A note on the Landauer principle in quantum statistical mechanics

Abstract

The Landauer principle asserts that the energy cost of erasure of one bit of information by the action of a thermal reservoir in equilibrium at temperature T is never less than $kTlog2$. We discuss Landauer's principle for quantum statistical models describing a finite level quantum system S coupled to an infinitely extended thermal reservoir R. Using Araki's perturbation theory of KMS states and the Avron-Elgart adiabatic theorem we prove, under a natural ergodicity assumption on the joint system S+R, that Landauer's bound saturates for adiabatically switched interactions. The recent work of Reeb and Wolf on the subject is discussed and compared.

References in corpus (3)

• Dissipative Transport: Thermal Contacts and Tunnelling Junctions
• Another Return of 'Return to Equilibrium'
• Theory of Non-Equilibrium Sationary States as a Theory of Resonances