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In this article, an experiment is referenced in which information was converted into energy via erasure. It is said that the slower the erasure took place, the less energy was released, and that the Landauer limit was approached as the length of the erasure approached infinity.

Is this trade-off inevitable, or did it have to do with how the experiment was performed? Has the trade-off been quantified?

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If I´m not missing anything, this is just the concept of adiabaticity in play, which is ubiquitous in thermodynamics (and quantum mechanics). It basically says that whenever you're doing something not infinitely slow, you're going to make random mistakes that produce an entropy, corresponding to an excess heat production beyond the work from the Landauer limit.

The Landauer limit is very fundamental, and its derivation needs little more than basic thermodynamics and the unification between the concepts of entropy in physics and information science. There have been proposed approaches to circumvent the limit, but they do so by violating a central assumption, thermal equilibrium (see e.g. a cooler computer)

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