Landauer's principle relates logically irreversible information erasure to thermodynamic cost. Resetting an initially equiprobable, uncorrelated one-bit memory to one standard state while coupled to a bath at temperature requires average heat release of at least to the bath in the ideal cyclic setting.
The restriction matters: erasing one unknown bit is different from reversibly transforming a known state, and real devices can dissipate more. The entropy reduction of the memory must be compensated elsewhere. The bound therefore concerns information loss under specified physical conditions, rather than a universal cost for every logic operation.[ref]
Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process by Rolf Landauer. 1961, logical irreversibility and heat generation
A later experiment represented a bit by the two wells of a potential trapping one colloidal particle. Driving the particle distribution into a chosen well allowed dissipated heat during erasure to be compared with the bound. Approaching the reversible limit requires slow controlled operations; measurement of the work and heat connects the information statement to a physical apparatus.[ref]
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10872. Bérut and others, 2012, abstract and single-particle erasure experiment
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Landauer's principle is a fundamental concept in information theory and thermodynamics, formulated by physicist Rolf Landauer in the 1960s. It establishes a relationship between information processing and thermodynamic entropy, particularly focusing on the energy cost of erasing information.