Spontaneous fluctuation-symmetry breaking and the Landauer principle

Abstract

We study the problem of the energetic cost of information erasure by looking at it through the lens of the Jarzynski equality. We observe that the Landauer bound, $⟨W⟩\ge kT\ln 2$, on average dissipated work $⟨W⟩$ associated to an erasure process, literally emerges from the underlying second law bound as formulated by Kelvin, $⟨W⟩\ge 0$, as consequence of a spontaneous breaking of the Crooks-Tasaki fluctuation-symmetry, that accompanies logical irreversibility. We illustrate and corroborate this insight with numerical simulations of the process of information erasure performed on a 2D Ising ferromagnet.

16 pages, 5 figures. Introduction revised in v2 and discussion session added in v3

References in corpus (5)

• Dissipation: The phase-space perspective
• High-precision test of Landauer's principle in a feedback trap
• Rare events and the convergence of exponentially averaged work values
• Generalized Clausius inequality for nonequilibrium quantum processes
• Information and entropy in quantum Brownian motion: Thermodynamic entropy versus von Neumann entropy

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• Generalized Landauer bound from absolute irreversibility
• Third law of thermodynamics and the scaling of quantum computers
• Improving the efficiency of finite-time memory erasure with potential barrier shaping
• One-particle engine with a porous piston