title: Experimental test of Landauer's principle in single-bit operations on nanomagnetic memory bits.
abstract: Minimizing energy dissipation has emerged as the key challenge in continuing to scale the performance of digital computers. The question of whether there exists a fundamental lower limit to the energy required for digital operations is therefore of great interest. A well-known theoretical result put forward by Landauer states that any irreversible single-bit operation on a physical memory element in contact with a heat bath at a temperature T requires at least k B T ln(2) of heat be dissipated from the memory into the environment, where k B is the Boltzmann constant. We report an experimental investigation of the intrinsic energy loss of an adiabatic single-bit reset operation using nanoscale magnetic memory bits, by far the most ubiquitous digital storage technology in use today. Through sensitive, high-precision magnetometry measurements, we observed that the amount of dissipated energy in this process is consistent (within 2 SDs of experimental uncertainty) with the Landauer limit. This result reinforces the connection between "information thermodynamics" and physical systems and also provides a foundation for the development of practical information processing technologies that approach the fundamental limit of energy dissipation. The significance of the result includes insightful direction for future development of information technology.
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Jeongmin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hong
authors.affiliation: Haynes and Boone LLP, 525 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301, USA.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Lambson
authors.affiliation: The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9185-2510
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dhuey
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
authors.forename: Jeffrey
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4541-0156
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bokor
mesh_terms: D003201:Computers; D008280:Magnetics; D036103:Nanotechnology; D013816:Thermodynamics
keywords: Energy Dissipation; Information thermodynamics; Landauer Erasure; Minimum Energy; Nanomagnetic memory