2018/09/24 by James Melbourne, Melbourne, James, Saurav Talukdar +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1809.09216
openalex publication_date 2018/09/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this article, we focus on erasure of a bit of information in finite time. Landauer's principle states that the average heat dissipation due to erasure of information is kB T ln 2, which is achievable only in an asymptotic manner. Recent theoretical developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and stochastic control, predict a more general bound for finite time erasure dependent on the Wasserstein distances between the initial and final configurations. These predictions suggest improvements to experimental protocol with regards to minimizing average heat dissipation for bit erasure in finite time from a bistable well, under overdamped Langevin dynamics. We present a comparative study of a theoretically optimal protocol with an existing protocol, and highlight the closeness and deviation from optimality