Experimental verification of Landauer's principle linking information and thermodynamics
Experimental verification of Landauer's principle linking information and thermodynamics
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DOI：
10.1038/nature10872
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发表时间：
2012-03-08
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Lutz, Eric
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Berut, Antoine;Arakelyan, Artak;Lutz, Eric
1961年，罗尔夫·兰道尔（Rolf Landauer）认为信息的擦除是一个耗散过程（1）。当删除一个经典信息位时，必然会产生一个与热能成比例的最小热量，称为Landauer界。这种逻辑上不可逆的转变的直接后果是环境的熵增加了一个有限的量。尽管擦除原理对信息论和计算机科学具有根本的重要性（2-5），但到目前为止，擦除原理还没有得到实验验证，主要障碍是在低耗散状态下进行单粒子实验的困难。在这里，我们实验表明存在的Landauer界在一个通用模型的一位内存。使用一个系统的单个胶体粒子被困在一个调制的双阱势，我们建立的平均耗散热饱和在朗道界的限制长擦除周期。这个结果证明了信息论和热力学之间的密切联系。它进一步强调了不可逆计算的最终物理极限。
In 1961, Rolf Landauer argued that the erasure of information is a dissipative process(1). A minimal quantity of heat, proportional to the thermal energy and called the Landauer bound, is necessarily produced when a classical bit of information is deleted. A direct consequence of this logically irreversible transformation is that the entropy of the environment increases by a finite amount. Despite its fundamental importance for information theory and computer science(2-5), the erasure principle has not been verified experimentally so far, the main obstacle being the difficulty of doing single-particle experiments in the low-dissipation regime. Here we experimentally show the existence of the Landauer bound in a generic model of a one-bit memory. Using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential, we establish that the mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound in the limit of long erasure cycles. This result demonstrates the intimate link between information theory and thermodynamics. It further highlights the ultimate physical limit of irreversible computation.