An improved Landauer principle with finite-size corrections

Landauerʼs principle relates entropy decrease and heat dissipation during logically irreversible processes. Most theoretical justifications of Landauerʼs principle either use thermodynamic reasoning or rely on specific models based on arguable assumptions. Here, we aim at a general and minimal setup...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNew journal of physics Vol. 16; no. 10; pp. 103011 - 37
Main Authors Reeb, David, Wolf, Michael M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Bristol IOP Publishing 07.10.2014
Subjects
Cooling
Entropy
heat
Inequalities
Irreversible processes
Landauerʼs principle
Physics
Proving
quantum information theory
Quantum statistics
Reservoirs
second law of thermodynamics
Statistical mechanics
Thermodynamics
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Summary:Landauerʼs principle relates entropy decrease and heat dissipation during logically irreversible processes. Most theoretical justifications of Landauerʼs principle either use thermodynamic reasoning or rely on specific models based on arguable assumptions. Here, we aim at a general and minimal setup to formulate Landauerʼs principle in precise terms. We provide a simple and rigorous proof of an improved version of the principle, which is formulated in terms of an equality rather than an inequality. The proof is based on quantum statistical mechanics concepts rather than on thermodynamic argumentation. From this equality version, we obtain explicit improvements of Landauerʼs bound that depend on the effective size of the thermal reservoir and reduce to Landauerʼs bound only for infinite-sized reservoirs.
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ISSN:1367-2630
1367-2630
DOI:10.1088/1367-2630/16/10/103011