title: Minimum energy requirements for quantum computation.
abstract: A lower bound on the amount of energy needed to carry out an elementary logical operation on a quantum computer, with a given accuracy and in a given time, is derived. The bound arises from the requirement that the controls used to manipulate the qubits, which ultimately are themselves quan-tum mechanical systems, must nonetheless be classical to a sufficiently good approximation; it is expected to hold under a wide variety of conditions, and independently of the nature of the physical systems used to encode the qubits. This could have important consequences for very large-scale quantum computations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72701, USA.
authors.forename: Julio
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gea-Banacloche