Testing Landauer’s Principle in a feedback trap, Physics Department Colloquium, John Bechhoefer, Simon Fraser University
2012-12-07 21:30 UTC | 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 4:30 pm)
Landauer's principle, formulated in 1961, postulates that irreversible logical or computational operations such as memory erasure require work, no matter how slowly they are performed. For example, to "reset to one" a one-bit memory requires a work of at least kT ln2, which is dissipated as heat. In 1982, Bennett pointed out a link to Maxwell's Demon: Were Landauer's principle to fail, it would be possible to repeatedly extract work from a heat bath.
