Impossibility of achieving Landauer’s bound for almost every quantum state

Abstract

The thermodynamic cost of resetting an arbitrary initial state to a particular desired state is lower bounded by Landauer's bound. However, here we demonstrate that this lower bound is necessarily unachievable for nearly every initial state, for any reliable reset mechanism. Since local heating threatens rapid decoherence, this issue is of substantial importance beyond mere energy efficiency. For the case of qubit reset, we find the minimally dissipative state analytically for any reliable reset protocol, in terms of the entropy-flow vector introduced here. This allows us to verify a recent theorem about initial-state dependence of entropy production for any finite-time transformation, as it pertains to quantum state preparation.