新科学想法 › 学术文库 › 学术文献 › 浏览文献

The thermodynamic meaning of negative entropy

唐唐添加于 2011-6-6 02:12 | 1737 次阅读 | 0 个评论

作者
Rio L del, Åberg J, Renner R, Dahlsten O, Vedral V
摘要
The heat generated by computations is not only an obstacle to circuit miniaturization but also a fundamental aspect of the relationship between information theory and thermodynamics. In principle, reversible operations may be performed at no energy cost; given that irreversible computations can always be decomposed into reversible operations followed by the erasure of data1, 2, the problem of calculating their energy cost is reduced to the study of erasure. Landauer’s principle states that the erasure of data stored in a system has an inherent work cost and therefore dissipates heat3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. However, this consideration assumes that the information about the system to be erased is classical, and does not extend to the general case where an observer may have quantum information about the system to be erased, for instance by means of a quantum memory entangled with the system. Here we show that the standard formulation and implications of Landauer’s principle are no longer valid in the presence of quantum information. Our main result is that the work cost of erasure is determined by the entropy of the system, conditioned on the quantum information an observer has about it. In other words, the more an observer knows about the system, the less it costs to erase it. This result gives a direct thermodynamic significance to conditional entropies, originally introduced in information theory. Furthermore, it provides new bounds on the heat generation of computations: because conditional entropies can become negative in the quantum case, an observer who is strongly correlated with a system may gain work while erasing it, thereby cooling the environment.
详细资料
- 文献种类: Journal Article
- 期刊名称: Nature
- 期刊缩写: Nature
- 期卷页: 2011年第474卷第7349期 61-63页
- ISBN: 0028-0836
学科领域信息系统 » 计算机科学
所属群组
信息科学综合
相关链接 DOI URL