Salambô Dago, Jorge Pereda, Nicolas Barros, Sergio Ciliberto, and
Ludovic Bellon, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 170601 (2021)
[Article] doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.170601
[Data set] doi:10.5281/zenodo.4626559
The Landauer principle states that at least kBT ln 2 of energy is required to erase a 1-bit memory, with kBT the thermal energy of the system. We study the effects of inertia on this bound using as one-bit memory an underdamped micro-mechanical oscillator confined in a double-well potential created by a feedback loop. The potential barrier is precisely tunable in the few kBT range. We measure, within the stochastic thermodynamic framework, the work and the heat of the erasure protocol. We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that, in this underdamped system, the Landauer bound is reached with a 1 % uncertainty, with protocols as short as 100 ms.
The left panel displays the position of the wells and of the threshold between them as a function of time, with two experimental trajectories superposed. The right panel shows the trajectories as small dots moving inside the potential while the information (their initial position) is erased.