Shakin' All Over: Proving Landauer's Principle without neglect of fluctuations

Abstract: Landauer's principle is, roughly, the principle that there is an entropic cost associated with implementation of logically irreversible operations. Though widely accepted in the literature on the thermodynamics of computation, it has been the subject of considerable dispute in the philosophical literature. Both the cogency of proofs of the principle and its relevance, should it be true, have been questioned. In particular, it has been argued that microscale fluctuations entail dissipation that always greatly exceeds the Landauer bound. In this article Landauer's principle is treated within statistical mechanics, and a proof is given that neither relies on neglect of fluctuations nor assumes the availability of thermodynamically reversible processes. In addition, it is argued that microscale fluctuations are no obstacle to approximating thermodynamic reversibility as closely as one would like