Thermodynamics of information

By Juan Manuel Rodríguez Parrondo, Jordan M. Horowitz, T. Sagawa. Nature Physics, 2015

729 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By its very nature, the second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic, in that its formulation requires a probabilistic description of the state of a system. This raises questions about the objectivity of the second law: does it depend, for example, on what we know about the system? For over a century, much effort has been devoted to incorporating information into thermodynamics and assessing the entropic and energetic costs of manipulating information. More recently, this historically theoretical pursuit has become relevant in practical situations where information is manipulated at small scales, such as in molecular and cell biology, artificial nano-devices or quantum computation. Here we give an introduction to a novel theoretical framework for the thermodynamics of information based on stochastic thermodynamics and fluctuation theorems, review some recent experimental results, and present an overview of the state of the art in the field. The task of integrating information into the framework of thermodynamics dates back to Maxwell and his infamous demon. Recent advances have made these ideas rigorous—and brought them into the laboratory.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79df82cf1fc3aaa5f86e3bf9ed5fadef09dfe458

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Citations in the corpus

Thermodynamic Unification of Optimal Transport: Thermodynamic Uncertainty Relation, Minimum Dissipation, and Thermodynamic Speed Limits (2022, methodology): “In addition, information manipulations such as measurement, feedback, erasure, and copying have been incorporated into thermodynamics, leading to significant developments in several subfields, such as the thermodynamics of information [41, 42] and computation [43, 44].”
Irreversibility in Active Matter Systems: Fluctuation Theorem and Mutual Information (2018, methodology): “The path-wise mutual information [104] between the particle trajectory x (starting at x0) and a realization η of the active fluctuations (with η(0) = η0) is given as”
Quantum Fluctuation Theorems for Arbitrary Environments: Adiabatic and Nonadiabatic Entropy Production (2017, background): “For non-equilibrium states there are some situations where the von Neumann entropy still can be interpreted as a thermodynamic entropy [61].”