Erasing information fast and cheap --- How to approach Landauer’s bound

The celebrated Landauer bound is the fundamental universal cost of computation: there must be dissipation of at least k_BTlog2 per erasure of one bit. This fundamental bound is reached when the erasure protocol is performed in the slow quasi-static limit. Generally, the faster the erasure protocol, the more dissipation is generated.  In this talk, I will present two approaches that challenge this view. First, it will be shown that by the use of a conserved quantity in the system, one can bypass Liouville’s theorem and perform erasure at zero energetic cost. The second approach that will be discussed is considering a system that is weakly coupled to the environment. In that case, one can design an erasure procedure that does not scale with its operation time.