Quantum vs Classical Erasure: Equal Bounds but Unequal Costs
arXiv:2607.27341
The paper compares how much energy is needed to erase a bit of information in classical versus quantum systems when resources are limited, showing that quantum erasure requires more control, larger energy gaps, and longer times despite having the same theoretical minimum cost.
Abstract
Irreversibility has a fundamental thermodynamic cost, erasing information inevitably generates heat. This connection is quantified by the Landauer bound, which gives the minimum dissipation needed to erase a single bit of information. While this bound applies in both classical and quantum settings, it is saturated only in idealised limits of infinite resources. Here, we provide a unified first principles description of finite-resource erasure in both classical and quantum systems. We begin by proving the communal folklore that in the idealised regime the erasure cost of a bit encoded in a quantum or classical system is the same. Despite this, we show that their practical implementation differs substantially: achieving comparable erasure quality in quantum systems requires more control, larger accessible energy gaps and longer operation times. Classical protocols can achieve the erasure of a comparable quantum protocol under far weaker constraints which we expose in trade-off relations. Our results explain why practical erasure schemes fall short of Landauer's bound and show that classical systems enjoy several fundamental thermodynamic advantages.