2022/08/23 by Hannah Earley, Earley, Hannah
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Neural Networks and Applications #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.11196
Conventional computing has many sources of heat dissipation, but one of these--the Landauer limit--poses a fundamental lower bound of 1 bit of entropy per bit erased. 'Reversible Computing' avoids this source of dissipation, but is dissipationless computation possible? In this paper, a general proof is given for open quantum systems showing that a computer thermally coupled to its environment will necessarily dissipate entropy (and hence heat). Specifically, a lower bound is obtained that corresponds to the adiabatic regime, in which the amount of entropy dissipated per computational operation is proportional to the rate of computation.