Experimental Test of Landauer's Principle at the Sub-kBT Level
Alexei O. Orlov, Craig S. Lent, Cameron C. Thorpe, Graham P. Boechler, Gregory L. Snider · Japanese Journal of Applied Physics · 2012
Landauer's principle connects the logical reversibility of computational operations to physical reversibility and hence to energy dissipation, with important theoretical and practical consequences. We report the first experimental test of Landauer's principle. For logically reversible operations we measure energy dissipations much less than k B Tlog 2, while irreversible operations dissipate much more than k B Tlog 2. Measurements of a logically reversible operation on a bit with energy 30 k B T yield an energy dissipation of 0.01 k B T.