Information erasure without an energy cost

Abstract

Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost in angular momentum or any other conserved quantity. Erasing the memory of Maxwell's demon in this way implies that work can be extracted from a single thermal reservoir at a cost of angular momentum and an increase in total entropy. The implications of this for the second law of thermodynamics are assessed.

8 pages with 1 figure. Final published version

References in corpus (3)

• The Physics of Maxwell's demon and information
• Minimal Energy Cost for Thermodynamic Information Processing: Measurement and Information Erasure
• The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory

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