Experimental Test of Landauer's Principle at the Sub-k_BT Level

Abstract

Landauer's principle connects the logical reversibility of computational operations to physical reversibility and hence to energy dissipation, with important theoretical and practical consequences. We report the first experimental test of Landauer's principle. For logically reversible operations we measure energy dissipations much less than k B T log 2, while irreversible operations dissipate much more than k B T log 2. Measurements of a logically reversible operation on a bit with energy 30 k B T yield an energy dissipation of 0.01 k B T . #

An improved Landauer principle with finite-size corrections

“…Furthermore, as we are assuming an initially thermal reservoir (see equation (4)), correlations in SR would be unnatural unless the full initial state SR ρ were also thermal, but this would then require a (Hamiltonian) interaction term between S and R; see also [dRi13]. Some reported 'violations' of Landauerʼs bound [AN01,Orl12] can be explained by their not respecting the initial product state assumption (5).…”

Cleaning Up: Garbage-Free Reversible Circuits by Design Languages

“…The actual amount of heat dissipated due to Landauer's principle is difÀcult to calculate, but it is proportional to the signal energy used to represent the erased information [16], and Landauer's limit of l P k f per dissipated bit is only a theoretical lower bound. Recently, Landauer's principle has been experimentally veriÀed [9] and it has also been shown that it is in fact possible to manipulate data in an electronic circuit with less dissipation than Landauer's limit [25]. This conÀrms Landauer's insight and gives hope for future applications.…”

Quantifying Irreversible Information Loss in Digital Circuits

“…But if, as is often the case, there is a copy of the bit elsewhere in the circuit, it can be used to erase the information with very little heat dissipation. Dissipation of as little as E = 0.01k B T as recently been demonstrated experimentally [Boechler et al 2010;Orlov et al 2012]. Practical trade-offs in speed and circuit complexity of adiabatic CMOS have by now a substantial literature [Younis and Knight Jr. 1993;Starosel skii 2001].…”