[quantum-info] IQC Colloquium May 13th, David Reeb QNC 0101

Erin Cronin emcronin at uwaterloo.ca
Sun May 12 11:27:02 EDT 2013


IQC Colloquium
Institute for Quantum Computing

Monday, 13 May 2013 at 2:30PM
QNC 0101

Proving Landauer's Principle
David Reeb
TU Munich

Abstract:
    Landauer's Principle fundamentally connects information theory and thermodynamics as it enforces a certain amount of heat dissipation during the (logically irreversible) erasure of information by any physical process. We review this connection and formulate in precise mathematical and microscopic terms the setup for Landauer's Principle. Based on this, we give a proof of an improved version of the Principle, which is formulated in terms of an equality rather than inequality and involves information-theoretic quantities.

    We then use this equality version to explicitly sharpen the usual Landauer bound in cases where the assisting reservoir is of finite size. The key technical element for this part is a new and tight lower bound on the relative entropy between two states in terms of their entropy difference and the dimension of the space. This inequality has other applications in thermodynamics and information theory, and the derived finite-size effects may be relevant for small thermodynamic devices such as error-correcting mechanisms. (Joint work with Michael Wolf.) 



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