Reversibility and energetics in optical computing.
Computer operations that conserve energy do not, from an information viewpoint, increase entropy and therefore have no minimum energy cost associated with them. An information-conserving operation must be reversible in principle; reversible optical gates inevitably incur losses. The energy per calculation may have many meanings, as we show. The energy expended by a single photon in a conservative optical operation is negligible, much less than kT.
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