High-Precision Test of Landauer’s Principle in a Feedback Trap
High-Precision Test of Landauer’s Principle in a Feedback Trap
We confirm Landauer's 1961 hypothesis that reducing the number of possible macroscopic states in a system by a factor of two requires work of at least kT ln 2. Our experiment uses a colloidal particle in a time-dependent, virtual potential created by a feedback trap to implement Landauer's erasure operation. …