2008/11/30 by Raoul Dillenschneider, Eric Lutz, Steven M. Schneider
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Military Strategy and Technology #Thermal properties of materials #cond-mat.stat-mech #stochastic dynamics and bifurcation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.102.210601
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 210601 (2009) · 4 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2009/06/18 · arxiv updated 2010/04/12 · openalex publication_date 2012/08/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/28
We consider an overdamped nanoparticle in a driven double-well potential as a generic model of an erasable 1-bit memory. We study in detail the statistics of the heat dissipated during an erasure process and show that full erasure may be achieved by dissipating less heat than the Landauer bound. We quantify the occurrence of such events and propose a single-particle experiment to verify our predictions. Our results show that Landauer's principle has to be generalized at the nanoscale to accommodate heat fluctuations.