Landauer’s erasure principle in a squeezed thermal memory

Energy dissipation is a key design factor in digital electronics. Improvements in our understanding of energy dissipation in information-processing devices are of high scientific and technological interest. In 1961, Rolf Landauer argued that there exists a limit to which the power consumption of an erasure operation in a computer memory can be reduced. Fundamental to that principle is the assumption of an operation close to thermal equilibrium. In a new preprint, we show that so-called squeezed thermal states, which may naturally arise in electronic circuits operating in a pulse-driven fashion, can be exploited to reduce the fundamental energy costs of an erasure operation. Our manuscript will be published soon in Physical Review Letters.