Experimental Test of Landauer's Principle at the Sub-kBTLevel

Landauer's principle connects the logical reversibility of computational operations to physical reversibility and hence to energy dissipation, with important theoretical and practical consequences. We report the first experimental test of Landauer's principle. For logically reversible operations we measure energy dissipations much less than kBTlog 2, while irreversible operations dissipate much more than kBTlog 2. Measurements of a logically reversible operation on a bit with energy 30 kBT yield an energy dissipation of 0.01 kBT.