We show that information in quantum memory can be erased and recovered perfectly if it is necessary. The fact that the final states of environment are completely determined by the initial states of the system allows an erasure operation to be realized by a swap operation between the system and an ancilla. Therefore, the erased information can be recovered. When there is an irreversible process, e.g. an irreversible operation or a decoherence process, in the erasure process, the information would be erased perpetually. We present that quantum erasure will also give heat dissipation in the environment. A classical limit of quantum erasure is given to coincide with Landauer's erasure principle.
We define the deconstruction cost of a tripartite quantum state on systems
ABE as the minimum rate of noise needed to apply to the
AE systems, such that there is negligible disturbance to the marginal state on the
BE systems, while the system
A of the resulting state is locally recoverable from the
E system alone. We refer to such actions as deconstruction operations and protocols implementing them as state deconstruction protocols. State deconstruction generalizes Landauer erasure of a single-party quantum state as well the erasure of correlations of a two-party quantum state. We find that the deconstruction cost of a tripartite quantum state on systems
ABE is equal to its conditional quantum mutual information (CQMI)
I(A;B∣E), thus giving the CQMI an operational interpretation in terms of a state deconstruction protocol. We also define a related task called conditional erasure, in which the goal is to apply noise to systems
AE in order to decouple system
A from systems
BE, while causing negligible disturbance to the marginal state of systems
BE. We find that the optimal rate of noise for conditional erasure is also equal to the CQMI
I(A;B∣E). State deconstruction and conditional erasure lead to operational interpretations of the quantum discord and squashed entanglement, which are quantum correlation measures based on the CQMI. We find that the quantum discord is equal to the cost of simulating einselection, the process by which a quantum system interacts with an environment, resulting in selective loss of information in the system. The squashed entanglement is equal to half the minimum rate of noise needed for deconstruction and/or conditional erasure if Alice has available the best possible system
E to help in the deconstruction and/or conditional erasure task.
Irreversibility has a fundamental thermodynamic cost, erasing information inevitably generates heat. This connection is quantified by the Landauer bound, which gives the minimum dissipation needed to erase a single bit of information. While this bound applies in both classical and quantum settings, it is saturated only in idealised limits of infinite resources. Here, we provide a unified first principles description of finite-resource erasure in both classical and quantum systems. We begin by proving the communal folklore that in the idealised regime the erasure cost of a bit encoded in a quantum or classical system is the same. Despite this, we show that their practical implementation differs substantially: achieving comparable erasure quality in quantum systems requires more control, larger accessible energy gaps and longer operation times. Classical protocols can achieve the erasure of a comparable quantum protocol under far weaker constraints which we expose in trade-off relations. Our results explain why practical erasure schemes fall short of Landauer's bound and show that classical systems enjoy several fundamental thermodynamic advantages.