Energy cost of information transmission (along the path to understanding)

✍ Scribed by Lev B. Levitin

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 407 KB
• Volume: 120
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-2789
• DOI: 10.1016/s0167-2789(98)00051-7

✦ Synopsis

It is shown that the minimum energy required to transmit a natural unit of information (nat) over a noisy channel is k T, where T is the effective noise temperature which depends on the interaction between the information career and the environment.

The result follows from the entropy defect principle and general laws of quantum dynamics without any specific assumptions.