Information Erasure

Understand

Information is central to thermodynamics, providing the grounds to the formulation of the theory in powerful abstract statistical terms.

• One must not forget, however, that, as put by Landauer, {\it information is physical}.
• This means that the processing of information will be unavoidably linked to the costs of manipulating the real physical systems carrying the information.
• Here we will focus on the particular process of erasing information, which plays a fundamental role in the description of heat engines.