The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory

By Martin Bodo Plenio, V. Vitelli. 2001

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article discusses the concept of information and its intimate relationship with physics. After an introduction of all the necessary quantum mechanical and information theoretical concepts we analyse Landauer's principle which states that the erasure of information is inevitably accompanied by the generation of heat. We employ this principle to rederive a number of results in classical and quantum information theory whose rigorous mathematical derivations are difficult. This demonstrates the usefulness of Landauer's principle and provides an introduction to the physical theory of information.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36d31516950520f4b398620a9a025846df50f3e2

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Irreversible entropy production: From classical to quantum (2020, background): “The act of interacting with a bath irreversibly erases this information (Plenio and Vitelli, 2001).”
An introduction to quantum machine learning (2014, methodology): “For a comprehensive introduction into quantum computing, we refer to the standard textbook by Nielsen and Chuang [2] as well as Plenio and Vitelli’s presentation of the concept of quantum information [32].”
Quantum thermodynamics (2015, methodology): “One way of resolving the paradox was presented by Bennett [46] and invokes Landauer’s erasure principle [47], as described in the next section and presented highly accessibly in [28].”
Daemonic ergotropy: enhanced work extraction from quantum correlations (2016, background): “4 Indeed, the very tight link between thermodynamics and quantum entanglement 21 cries loud for the clari ﬁ cation of the role of quantum correlations as a resource for coherent thermodynamic processes and transformations.”