logoalt Hacker News

svnttoday at 6:59 PM1 replyview on HN

This was published right before people started experimentally validating the Landauer limit. I am not sure why it hasn’t been taken down at some point as the evidence has accumulated:

2012 — Bérut et al. (Nature) — They used a single colloidal silica bead (2 μm) trapped in a double-well potential created by a focused laser. By modulating the potential to erase the bit, they showed that mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound (k_B T ln 2) in the limit of long erasure cycles.

https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~morozov/677_f2017/Physics_6...

2014 — Jun et al. (PRL) — A higher-precision follow-up using 200 nm fluorescent particles in an electrokinetic feedback trap. Same basic physics, tighter error bars.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4795654/

2016 — Hong et al. (Science Advances) — First test on actual digital memory hardware. Used arrays of sub-100 nm single-domain Permalloy nanomagnets and measured energy dissipation during adiabatic bit erasure using magneto-optic Kerr effect magnetometry. The measured dissipation was consistent with the Landauer limit within 2 standard deviations using the actual the basis of magnetic storage.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1501492

2018 — Guadenzi et al. (Nature Physics) — Opens with:

The erasure of a bit of information is an irreversible operation whose minimal entropy production of kB ln 2 is set by the Landauer limit1. This limit has been verified in a variety of classical systems, including particles in traps2,3 and nanomagnets4. Here, we extend it to the quantum realm by using a crystal of molecular nanomagnets as a quantum spin memory and showing that its erasure is still governed by the Landauer principle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0070-7

The Landauer limit is not conjecture.


Replies

ogogmadtoday at 7:03 PM

I'm not sure, but isn't 2 standard deviations a bit low? Especially so for something that can be done in a lab. It seems that 2 SD is the minimum threshold for getting published. Can we be sure that these are properly reviewed?

show 2 replies