Dissipationless Information Erasure and Landauer's Principle

Abstract

It is widely accepted that information erasure entails heat dissipation. Here we analyze asymmetric memory states to show that this energy cost can be shuffled around to any step in a write-erase cycle and need not accompany the logically irreversible step in a computation. We discuss the resulting symmetry between logically irreversible and reversible operations, along with the implications for resolutions of Maxwell's demon paradox.