Landauer's principle states that information erasure requires heat dissipation. While Landauer's original result focused on equilibrium memories, we here investigate the reset of information stored in a nonequilibrium state of a symmetric two-state memory. We derive a nonequilibrium generalization of the erasure principle and demonstrate that the corresponding bounds on heat and work may be reduced to zero. We further introduce reset protocols that harness energy and entropy of the initial preparation and so allow to reach these nonequilibrium bounds. We finally provide numerical simulations with realistic parameters of an optically levitated nanosphere memory that support these findings. Our results indicate that local dissipation-free information reset is possible away from equilibrium.

Landauer原理指出，信息擦除需要散热。尽管Landauer的原始结果侧重于平衡内存，但我们在这里研究了对称两态内存的非平衡状态下存储的信息的重置。我们得出了擦除原理的一个非平衡概括，并证明了热量和功的相应界限可以减小到零。我们进一步介绍了重置协议，这些协议利用了初始准备工作的能量和熵，因此可以达到这些非平衡范围。最后，我们提供了具有浮游性纳米球存储器的现实参数的数值模拟，从而支持了这些发现。我们的结果表明，本地无耗散信息重置有可能偏离平衡。