Fooling the Landauer bound with a demon biased thermal bath

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates experimentally that by introducing hysteresis in a feedback-controlled system, it is possible to effectively bypass the Landauer limit on the minimum energy required for information erasure, revealing new insights into thermodynamics and information.

Contribution

The study introduces a method to circumvent the Landauer bound using hysteresis in a feedback system, acting as a Maxwell demon to reduce erasure energy below fundamental limits.

Findings

Achieved erasure with over 20% less energy than the Landauer bound.

Engineered a non-equilibrium steady state with tunable effective temperature.

Showed hysteresis acts as an embedded Maxwell demon exploiting information to reduce entropy.

Abstract

The Landauer principle establishes a fundamental lower bound on the energetic cost of the erasure of a one-bit memory in thermal equilibrium. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how this bound can be effectively circumvented by introducing a hysteresis in the feedback-generated virtual potential of a micro-resonator acting as the information bit. By tuning the hysteresis, we engineer a non-equilibrium steady state with an adjustable effective temperature, enabling erasure processes that consume over 20 percents below the Landauer bound. Our results reveal that the hysteresis acts as an embedded Maxwell demon, exploiting temporal and spatial information to reduce the system's entropy and the thermodynamic transformation cost. This approach provides a versatile platform for exploring the interplay between feedback, information, and energy in stochastic systems.