Thermodynamical versus Logical Irreversibility: A Concrete Objection to Landauer’s Principle

Landauer’s principle states that the logical irreversibility of an operation, such as erasing one bit, whatever its physical implementation, necessarily implies its thermodynamical irreversibility. In this paper, a very simple counterexample of physical implementation (that uses a two-to-one relation between logic and thermodynamic states) is given that allows one bit to be erased in a thermodynamical quasistatic manner (i.e., one that may tend to be reversible if slowed down enough).