Postdoc @ University of Vienna
Tuesday June 28 – 16.45 BST
Experimental nonequilibrium memory erasure beyond Landauer’s bound
Logically irreversible transformations unavoidably consume power and cause heat dissipation. On a fundamental level, Landauer’s bound provides the minimum value of these energetic costs when erasing one bit of information in equilibrium with its environment [1]. Several proof-of-concept experiments have successfully reached this limit [2-6]. Yet, real devices operate out of equilibrium, calling for a deeper understanding of the underlying thermodynamic laws in this regime [7-9]. Here, we demonstrate the possibility to control the thermodynamics of a two-state memory by separating nonequilibrium memory preparation from memory processing [10]. Specifically, we report the first experimental demonstration of the full reset of one bit of information that evades the seemingly inevitable heat dissipation when stored in an out-of-equilibrium state. To achieve this, we developed an electro-optical double-well trap for levitated nanoparticles that can be shaped dynamically, allowing for precise and fast memory state preparation and processing. Our results indicate that far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics can offer a route for heat management in computational architectures paving the road for the extension of the research question to the quantum regime.
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[3] Orlov, A. O., Lent, C. S., Thorpe, C. C., Boechler, G. P. & Snider, G. L. Experimental test of Landauer’s principle at the sub-kBT level. Japanese Journal of Applied Physics 51, 06FE10 (2012).
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[5] Hong, J., Lambson, B., Dhuey, S. & Bokor, J. Experimental test of Landauer’s principle in single-bit operations on nanomagnetic memory bits. Science Advances 2, 3 (2016).
[6] Dago, S., Pereda, J., Barros, N., Ciliberto, S. & Bellon, L. Information and thermodynamics: Fast and precise approach to landauer’s bound in an underdamped micromechanical oscillator. Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 170601 (2021).
[7] Esposito, M. & den Broeck, C. V. Second law and Landauer principle far from equilibrium. EPL (Europhysics Letters) 95, 40004 (2011).
[8] Wolpert, D. H. The stochastic thermodynamics of computation. J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 52, 193001 (2019).
[9] Konopik, M., Friedenberger, A., Kiesel, N. & Lutz, E. Nonequilibrium information erasure below kTln2. EPL 131, 6004 (2020)
[10] Ciampini, M.A. et al. Experimental nonequilibrium memory erasure beyond Landauer’s bound, arXiv:2107.04429