Work as a function of protocol duration for the efficient erasure of an underdamped memory: isothermal to adiabatic transition
Abstract
We use evolutionary reinforcement learning to determine efficient time-dependent erasure protocols for an underdamped cantilever moving in a double-well potential, an experimental realization of a 1-bit memory. We investigate how the mean work $\langle W \rangle $ needed to erase a bit scales as a function of the protocol duration τ. We find two regimes, depending on how τ compares to the relaxation time of the system tr. For τ≫ tr, the quasistatic isothermal regime, we recover Landauer's bound plus an overhead that scales as 1/τ, similar to the overdamped case. By contrast, for τ<tr erasure becomes adiabatic and ⟨ W ⟩ grows more slowly than in the isothermal case. This growth is bounded from below as 1/τ, which we derive using a gedanken optimal protocol. Finally, comparison with overdamped erasure shows that learned protocols can outperform protocols that are optimal subject to equilibrium boundary conditions.
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BibTeX
@misc{barros2026work,
title = {{Work as a function of protocol duration for the efficient erasure of an underdamped memory: isothermal to adiabatic transition}},
author = {Nicolas Barros and Stephen Whitelam and Sergio Ciliberto and Ludovic Bellon},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.11473},
eprint = {2609.11473},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11473},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Work as a function of protocol duration for the efficient erasure of an underdamped memory: isothermal to adiabatic transition
AU - Nicolas Barros
AU - Stephen Whitelam
AU - Sergio Ciliberto
AU - Ludovic Bellon
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.11473
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11473
AB - We use evolutionary reinforcement learning to determine efficient time-dependent erasure protocols for an underdamped cantilever moving in a double-well potential, an experimental realization of a 1-bit memory. We investigate how the mean work $\langle W \rangle $ needed to erase a bit scales as a function of the protocol duration τ. We find two regimes, depending on how τ compares to the relaxation time of the system t_r. For τ≫ t_r, the quasistatic isothermal regime, we recover Landauer's bound plus an overhead that scales as 1/τ, similar to the overdamped case. By contrast, for τ<t_r erasure becomes adiabatic and ⟨ W ⟩ grows more slowly than in the isothermal case. This growth is bounded from below as 1/τ, which we derive using a gedanken optimal protocol. Finally, comparison with overdamped erasure shows that learned protocols can outperform protocols that are optimal subject to equilibrium boundary conditions.
ER -