Landauer's Principle at Zero Temperature

Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Jun 19;124(24):240601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.240601.

Abstract

Landauer's bound relates changes in the entropy of a system with the inevitable dissipation of heat to the environment. The bound, however, becomes trivial in the limit of zero temperature. Here we show that it is possible to derive a tighter bound which remains nontrivial even as T→0. As in the original case, the only assumption we make is that the environment is in a thermal state. Nothing is said about the state of the system or the kind of system-environment interaction. Our bound is valid for all temperatures and is always tighter than the original one, tending to it in the limit of high temperatures.