Shakin' All Over: Proving Landauer's Principle without neglect of fluctuations

Understand

Landauer's principle is, roughly, the principle that there is an entropic cost associated with implementation of logically irreversible operations.

• Though widely accepted in the literature on the thermodynamics of computation, it has been the subject of considerable dispute in the philosophical literature.
• Both the cogency of proofs of the principle and its relevance, should it be true, have been questioned.
• In particular, it has been argued that microscale fluctuations entail dissipation that always greatly exceeds the Landauer bound.