Blog: Quantum Knowledge Cools Computers

Quantum Knowledge Cools Computers
ETH Zurich (06/01/11) Simone Ulmer

Researchers at ETH Zurich and the National University of Singapore have found that, under certain conditions, cold is generated instead of heat when deleting data if the memory is known "more than completely," as is the case during quantum-mechanical entanglement because it carries more information than a classical copy of the data. The Landauer's Principle states that energy is always released as heat when data is deleted. "According to Landauer's Principle, if a certain number of computing operations per second is exceeded, the heat generated can no longer be dissipated," which will put supercomputers at a critical limit in the next 10 to 20 years, says ETH Zurich professor Renato Renner. However, the new study shows that during quantum entanglement, the deletion operation becomes a reversible process and Landauer's Principle holds true. The researchers proved this mathematically by combining the entropy concepts from information theory and thermodynamics. "We have now shown that the notion of entropy actually describes the same thing in both cases," Renner says. The results show that in a quantum computer, the entropy would be negative, meaning that heat would be withdrawn from the environment and the machine would cool down.

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