Quantum vs Classical Erasure: Equal Bounds but Unequal Costs
Source: Originally published on arXiv quant-ph on July 31, 2026.
arXiv:2607.27341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Irreversibility has a fundamental thermodynamic cost, erasing information inevitably generates heat. This connection is quantified by the Landauer bound, which gives the minimum dissipation needed to erase a single bit of information. While this bound applies in both classical and quantum settings, it is saturated only in idealised limits of infinite resources. Here, we provide a unified first principles description of finite-resource erasure in both classical and quantum systems. We begin by proving the communal folklore that in the idealised regime the erasure cost of a bit encoded in a quantum or classical system is the same. Despite this, we show that their practical implementation differs substantially: achieving comparable erasure quali...
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