State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.
School of Physics, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Phys Rev Lett. 2018 May 25;120(21):210601. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.210601.
One of the outstanding challenges to information processing is the eloquent suppression of energy consumption in the execution of logic operations. The Landauer principle sets an energy constraint in deletion of a classical bit of information. Although some attempts have been made to experimentally approach the fundamental limit restricted by this principle, exploring the Landauer principle in a purely quantum mechanical fashion is still an open question. Employing a trapped ultracold ion, we experimentally demonstrate a quantum version of the Landauer principle, i.e., an equality associated with the energy cost of information erasure in conjunction with the entropy change of the associated quantized environment. Our experimental investigation substantiates an intimate link between information thermodynamics and quantum candidate systems for information processing.
信息处理中一个突出的挑战是在执行逻辑运算时有效地抑制能量消耗。兰道尔原理为删除经典信息位设定了能量约束。尽管已经有一些尝试来实验接近这个原理所限制的基本极限，但以纯粹量子力学的方式探索兰道尔原理仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。我们利用囚禁的超冷离子，实验上演示了兰道尔原理的量子版本，即与信息擦除的能量代价相关联的等式以及相关量子环境的熵变化。我们的实验研究证实了信息热力学和信息处理的量子候选系统之间的紧密联系。
