Landauer Erasure with Side Information

Quantify how retained information lowers an ideal bit-erasure work bound.

Experiment

In this experiment, you can observe how retaining side information can theoretically lower the thermodynamic cost of erasure.

1. Open the Landauer Erasure with Side Information interactive module.
2. Set Bit probability to 0.5 and Temperature kelvin to 300.
3. Set Side-channel error to 0.1.
4. Set Erasure to With side information. You should observe the work is around 1.346e-21 J.
5. Change Erasure to Without side information. Notice that the charged entropy increases to H(X), and the minimum work bound roughly doubles to 2.871e-21 J.
6. Change Side-channel error to 0.5 to make Y completely independent of X. The conditional entropy H(X|Y) becomes equal to H(X), and side information offers no thermodynamic advantage.

Open Landauer Erasure with Side Information