Rome, September 19th 2017
Luca Gammaitoni, NiPS Lab director, is presenting a talk at the international workshop “Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics of Small Systems” Roma, September 18-20, 2017.
The talk will be given at 12:15 at the AULA CONVERSI at the Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita’ Sapienza in Rome.
Title of the talk: Fundamental thermodynamic limits in memory preservation
Abstract:
Once written, any memory is doomed to loose its content after some time, if no action is taken. In modern computers, to avoid memory losses, a refresh procedure is periodically performed. In this paper we present theoretical and experimental study of sub-k_BT system to evaluate the minimum energy required to preserve one bit of information over time. Two main conclusions are drawn: i) You can keep your memory for free: the energetic cost to preserve information for a fixed time duration with a given error probability can be arbitrarily reduced if the refresh procedure is performed often enough. ii) You cannot keep it forever: the Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets an upper bound on the memory lifetime.
L. Gammaitoni at the Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics of Small Systems workshop