Notes on Landauer's Principle, Reversible Computation, and Maxwell's Demon

By Charles H. Bennett. 2002

523 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Landauer's principle, often regarded as the basic principle of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment. Conversely, it is generally accepted that any logically reversible transformation of information can in principle be accomplished by an appropriate physical mechanism operating in a thermodynamically reversible fashion. These notions have sometimes been criticized either as being false, or as being trivial and obvious, and therefore unhelpful for purposes such as explaining why Maxwell's Demon cannot violate the second law of thermodynamics. Here I attempt to refute some of the arguments against Landauer's principle, while arguing that although in a sense it is indeed a straightforward consequence or restatement of the Second Law, it still has considerable pedagogic and explanatory power, especially in the context of other influential ideas in nineteenth and twentieth century physics. Similar arguments have been given by Jeffrey Bub (2002).

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b241586ab7d8fe7df56706b9d11659ab7776dd8

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Citations in the corpus

Introduction to Quantum Thermodynamics: History and Prospects (2018, background): “This leads to the Landauer formula [156, 157] which puts the lower limit equal to kBT ln 2 for the work needed to reset a bit of information in a memory Qbook:Ch.”
Quantum, classical, and total amount of correlations in a quantum state (2004, background): “These ideas were further developed by other researchers (most prominently Bennett) into a deep connection of classical information and thermodynamics (see [2] for a recent survey).”
Neural Field Continuum Limits and the Structure–Function Partitioning of Cognitive–Emotional Brain Networks (2023, background): “Furthermore, since an agent’s cognitive-emotional state might stay unchanged or might switch to another state of different fitness, state lability can be regarded as a transition between competing logic states or cognitive-emotional structures and functions, with Equation (12) agreeing with Landauer”
Compendium of the Foundations of Classical Statistical Physics (2007, background): “- Maxwell’s demon and Landauer’s principle: (Klein 1970, Earman & Norton 1998, 1999, Leff& Rex 2003, Bennett 2003, Norton 1005, Maroney 2005, Ladyman et al. 2006).”
A free energy principle for a particular physics (2019, background): “ exp(3):1)30. This would generate 1.24 10−20 J at a body temperature of 300o K. For comparison, the Landauer limit (for the equivalent 4.32 bits of information) at room temperature is 1.19 10−20 J (Bennett, 2003; Landauer, 1961): see also (Matta and Massa, 2017). We have, somewhat arbitrarily, asso”
Information Processing and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: An Inclusive Hamiltonian Approach. (2013, background): “[24] C. H. Bennett, “The thermodynamics of computation – a review,” Int.”
Basis for a neuronal version of Grover's quantum algorithm (2014, result): “For technological systems (Bennett, 2003; Ladyman et al., 2007) and individual cells (Clark, 2010b,c,d, 2011, 2012b, 2013a; Bérut et al., 2012; Mehta and Schwab, 2012), this behavior is consistent with Landauer’s principle of energy/information transfer.”