caa a22 4500 528785907 20190713030955.0 cr unu---uuuuu 180924s2015 xx s 000 0 eng 10.3929/ethz-b-000103477 doi 10.1038/ncomms8669 doi (ETHRESEARCH)oai:www.research-collection.ethz.ch:20.500.11850/103477 The minimal work cost of information processing [Elektronische Daten] [Philippe Faist, Frédéric Dupuis, Jonathan Oppenheim, Renato Renner] Nat Commun Open access ethresearch Irreversible information processing cannot be carried out without some inevitable thermodynamical work cost. This fundamental restriction, known as Landauer's principle, is increasingly relevant today, as the energy dissipation of computing devices impedes the development of their performance. Here we determine the minimal work required to carry out any logical process, for instance a computation. It is given by the entropy of the discarded information conditional to the output of the computation. Our formula takes precisely into account the statistically fluctuating work requirement of the logical process. It enables the explicit calculation of practical scenarios, such as computational circuits or quantum measurements. On the conceptual level, our result gives a precise and operational connection between thermodynamic and information entropy, and explains the emergence of the entropy state function in macroscopic thermodynamics. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 ethresearch Faist Philippe joint author Dupuis Frédéric joint author Oppenheim Jonathan joint author Renner Renato joint author Nature Communications London : Nature Publishing Group 6, p. 7669 2041-1723 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/103477 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) 1 Journal Article ethresearch ETHRESEARCH 856 40 http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/103477 text/html WWW-Backlink auf das Repository (Open access) ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Faist Philippe joint author ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Dupuis Frédéric joint author ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Oppenheim Jonathan joint author ETHRESEARCH 700 1- Renner Renato joint author ETHRESEARCH 773 0- Nature Communications London : Nature Publishing Group 6, p. 7669 2041-1723 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH ETHRESEARCH Journal Article Open access