Energy Limits in Computation

Chapter1: Information and Entropy in Physical Systems.- Chapter2: Conditional Erasure and the Landauer Limit.- Chapter3: Second law, entropy production, and reversibility in thermodynamics of information.- Chapter4: The Thermodynamics of Computation: A Contradiction.- Chapter5: The physics of information: from Maxwell to Landauer.- Chapter6: Experimental Tests of the Landauer Principle in electron circuits, and quasi-adiabatic computing systems.

Craig S. Lent is the Frank M. Freimann Chair Professor of Engineering and Concurrent Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD in Solid State Physics in 1984 from the University of Minnesota. His field of research is quantum devices and molecular-scale devices. The current research of his group focusses on the fundamental theoretical limits imposed by physics on computing devices. For the past several years his group has been investigating these questions in the context of a new transistor-less paradigm known as Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA), developed at Notre Dame and now the subject of research worldwide.

Alexei O. Orlov received the M.S. degree in physics from the Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, in 1983. He is currently a Research Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA. From 1983 to 1993, he worked at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia. He received the Ph.D. degree in physics of semiconductors and dielectrics from the same Institute in 1990. During that time, he conducted research on mesoscopic and quantum ballistic effects in electron transport of GaAs field-effect transistors. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter, U.K. in 1993, and joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, in 1994. His research interests include experimental studies of mesoscopic, single-electron and molecular electronic devices and sensors, nanomagnetics, quantum-dot cellular automata and nanothermoelectrics. He has authored or coauthored more than 150 publications.

Wolfgang Porod currently is Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He received his Diplom (M.S.) and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Graz, Austria, in 1979 and 1981, respectively. After appointments as a postdoctoral fellow at Colorado State University and