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arXiv · 2106.07570

Spontaneous fluctuation-symmetry breaking and the Landauer principle

Lorenzo Buffoni·Michele Campisi
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Abstract

We study the problem of the energetic cost of information erasure by looking at it through the lens of the Jarzynski equality. We observe that the Landauer bound, $\langle W \rangle \geq kT \ln 2$, on average dissipated work $\langle W \rangle$ associated to an erasure process, literally emerges from the underlying second law bound as formulated by Kelvin, $\langle W \rangle \geq 0$, as consequence of a spontaneous breaking of the Crooks-Tasaki fluctuation-symmetry, that accompanies logical irreversibility. We illustrate and corroborate this insight with numerical simulations of the process of information erasure performed on a 2D Ising ferromagnet.

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Lorenzo Buffoni, Michele Campisi. 2021-06-14. Spontaneous fluctuation-symmetry breaking and the Landauer principle. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-022-02877-8

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