Landauer's principle states that the minimum energy needed to erase one bit of information is proportional to the temperature at which the system is operating.
[10] In 2016, researchers used a laser probe to measure the amount of energy dissipation that resulted when a nanomagnetic bit flipped from off to on.
[11] A 2018 article published in Nature Physics features a Landauer erasure performed at cryogenic temperatures (T = 1 K) on an array of high-spin (S = 10) quantum molecular magnets.
The array is made to act as a spin register where each nanomagnet encodes a single bit of information.
Owing to the fast dynamics and low "inertia" of the single spins used in the experiment, the researchers also showed how an erasure operation can be carried out at the lowest possible thermodynamic cost—that imposed by the Landauer principle—and at a high speed.
[12][1] The principle is widely accepted as physical law, but it has been challenged for using circular reasoning and faulty assumptions.
On the other hand, recent advances in non-equilibrium statistical physics have established that there is not a prior relationship between logical and thermodynamic reversibility.