Cost of remembering a bit of information

Abstract

In 1961, Rolf Landauer pointed out that resetting a binary memory requires a minimum energy of $k_{B}T\ln (2)$. However, once written, any memory is doomed to loose its content if no action is taken. To avoid memory losses, a refresh procedure is periodically performed. In this paper we present a theoretical model and an experiment on a micro-electro-mechanical system to evaluate the minimum energy required to preserve one bit of information over time. Two main conclusions are drawn: i) in principle the energetic cost to preserve information for a fixed time duration with a given error probability can be arbitrarily reduced if the refresh procedure is performed often enough; ii) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets an upper bound on the memory lifetime.

15 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Limits on Fundamental Limits to Computation
• Minimum energetic cost to maintain a target nonequilibrium state
• Preserving Information from the Beginning to the End of time in a Robertson-Walker Spacetime
• Landauer Bound for Analog Computing Systems
• Heat production and error probability relation in Landauer reset at effective temperature
• When is a bit worth much more than kT ln2?

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