Abstract

Landauer's principle is one of the pillars of the physics of information. It constitutes one of the foundations behind the idea that "information is physical". Landauer's principle establishes the smallest amount of energy that has to be dissipated when one bit of information is erased from a computing device. Here we explore an extended Landauerlike principle valid for general dynamical systems (not necessarily Hamiltonian) governed by divergenceless phase space flows. © 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.