Fundamental Energy Requirement of Reversible Quantum Operations

Abstract

Landauer’s principle asserts that any computation has an unavoidable energy cost that grows proportionally to its degree of logical irreversibility. But even a logically reversible operation, when run on a physical processor that operates on different energy levels, requires energy. Here we quantify this energy requirement, providing upper and lower bounds that coincide up to a constant factor. We derive these bounds from a general quantum resource-theoretic argument, which implies that the initial resource requirement for implementing a unitary operation within an error ε grows like 1/sqrt[ε] times the amount of resource generated by the operation. Applying these results to quantum circuits, we find that their energy requirement can, by an appropriate design, be made independent of their time complexity.