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Cited by 233

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The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory

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Plenio, M. B., Vitelli, V.·2001·Contemporary Physics

Abstract

This article discusses the concept of information and its intimate relationship with physics. After an introduction of all the necessary quantum mechanical and information theoretical concepts we analyse Landauer's principle which states that the erasure of information is inevitably accompanied by the generation of heat. We employ this principle to rederive a number of results in classical and quantum information theory whose rigorous mathematical derivations are difficult. This demonstrates the usefulness of Landauer's principle and provides an introduction to the physical theory of information.

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Metadata

Authors
Plenio, M. B., & Vitelli, V.
Venue
Contemporary Physics
Published
2001-01
Volume
42
Issue
1
Pages
25-60
ISSN
  • 0010-7514 (ISSN-L)
  • 1366-5812
OpenAlex
W2037645123
Cited by
233
References
0
FWCI
1.62
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/00107510010018916
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Plenio, M. B., & Vitelli, V. (2001). The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory. Contemporary Physics. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107510010018916

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.