Rolf Landauer (source code)

= Rolf Landauer
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<Rolf Landauer> connected logical irreversibility with physical entropy production. His 1961 analysis examined operations whose outputs do not uniquely determine their inputs, making the discarded information part of the thermodynamic accounting.<Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process by Rolf Landauer>[Logical irreversibility, bistable devices and heat generation]{ref}

For the ideal isothermal erasure of an initially unbiased bit into one standard state, <Landauer's principle> gives a minimum reservoir heat $Q\geq k_BT\ln2$ under the usual cyclic-device assumptions. The information-bearing system loses entropy, which must be accounted for elsewhere. This statement concerns the specified erasure process; it is not a universal fixed heat cost for every reversible logical operation.