title: The minimal work cost of information processing.
abstract: Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost. This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing devices impedes the development of their performance. Here we determine the minimal work required to carry out any logical process, for instance a computation. It is given by the entropy of the discarded information conditional to the output of the computation. Our formula takes precisely into account the statistically fluctuating work requirement of the logical process. It enables the explicit calculation of practical scenarios, such as computational circuits or quantum measurements. On the conceptual level, our result gives a precise and operational connection between thermodynamic and information entropy, and explains the emergence of the entropy state function in macroscopic thermodynamics.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Str. 27, Zurich 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Faist
authors.affiliation: 1] Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Str. 27, Zurich 8093, Switzerland [2] Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, IT-Parken, Aabogade 34, Denmark 8200 [3] Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Botanická 68a, Brno 612 00, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Dupuis
authors.affiliation: Department for Physics and Astronomy, University College of London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT UK.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Oppenheim
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Str. 27, Zurich 8093, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Renato
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Renner