Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 210601 (2009) [4 pages]Memory Erasure in Small SystemsReceived 2 December 2008; published 29 May 2009 We consider an overdamped nanoparticle in a driven double-well potential as a generic model of an erasable 1-bit memory. We study in detail the statistics of the heat dissipated during an erasure process and show that full erasure may be achieved by dissipating less heat than the Landauer bound. We quantify the occurrence of such events and propose a single-particle experiment to verify our predictions. Our results show that Landauer’s principle has to be generalized at the nanoscale to accommodate heat fluctuations. © 2009 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.210601
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.210601
PACS:
05.40.−a, 05.70.Ln
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