Document Detail


Experimental verification of Landauer's principle linking information and thermodynamics.
MedLine Citation:
PMID:  22398556     Owner:  NLM     Status:  In-Process    
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
In 1961, Rolf Landauer argued that the erasure of information is a dissipative process. A minimal quantity of heat, proportional to the thermal energy and called the Landauer bound, is necessarily produced when a classical bit of information is deleted. A direct consequence of this logically irreversible transformation is that the entropy of the environment increases by a finite amount. Despite its fundamental importance for information theory and computer science, the erasure principle has not been verified experimentally so far, the main obstacle being the difficulty of doing single-particle experiments in the low-dissipation regime. Here we experimentally show the existence of the Landauer bound in a generic model of a one-bit memory. Using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential, we establish that the mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound in the limit of long erasure cycles. This result demonstrates the intimate link between information theory and thermodynamics. It further highlights the ultimate physical limit of irreversible computation.
Authors:
Antoine Bérut; Artak Arakelyan; Artyom Petrosyan; Sergio Ciliberto; Raoul Dillenschneider; Eric Lutz
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Publication Detail:
Type:  Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't     Date:  2012-03-07
Journal Detail:
Title:  Nature     Volume:  483     ISSN:  1476-4687     ISO Abbreviation:  Nature     Publication Date:  2012 Mar 
Date Detail:
Created Date:  2012-03-08     Completed Date:  -     Revised Date:  -    
Medline Journal Info:
Nlm Unique ID:  0410462     Medline TA:  Nature     Country:  England    
Other Details:
Languages:  eng     Pagination:  187-9     Citation Subset:  IM    
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Physique, École Normale Supérieure, CNRS UMR5672, 46 Allée d'Italie, 69364 Lyon, France.
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