Abstract
Computer operations that conserve energy do not, from an information viewpoint, increase entropy and therefore have no minimum energy cost associated with them. An information-conserving operation must be reversible in principle; reversible optical gates inevitably incur losses. The energy per calculation may have many meanings, as we show. The energy expended by a single photon in a conservative optical operation is negligible, much less than kT.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
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