The erasure of a classical bit of information is a dissipative process. The minimum heat produced during this operation has been theorized by Rolf Landauer in 1961 to be equal to kBT ln2 and takes the name of Landauer limit, Landauer reset or Landauer principle. Despite its fundamental importance, the Landauer limit remained untested experimentally for more than fifty years until recently when ...

We numerically analyze the transmission through a thin disordered wire offinite length attached to perfect leads, by making use of banded random Hamiltonian matrices. We compare the Landauer and the Thouless conductances. and find that they are proportional to each other in the diffusive regime, while in the localized regime the Landauer conductance is approximately proportional to the square o...

In thermodynamics, one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer’s erasure principle, which states that the erasure of one bit of information requires a minimum energy cost equal to kT ln(2), where T is the temperature of a thermal reservoir used in the process and k is Boltzmann’s constant. Jaynes, however, argued...