The Thermodynamics of Copying Information: Accuracy, Not Erasure, Sets the Price
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Copying a bit, unlike erasing it, has no Landauer floor: copying a known bit onto a blank target is logically reversible, and the minimum copy energy is set by accuracy. In an antipodal discrimination model against Gaussian thermal noise the minimum is 1.31e-19 J per bit at an error probability of 1e-15 at 300 K. DNA replication copies at 8.30e-20 J per bit with a final error rate of 1e-10 per base (2.00004 ATP equivalents per base, including proofreading and mismatch-repair costs), within a factor of 1.92 of the accuracy floor per copied symbol. Silicon copying costs 4.50e-11 J per bit (DRAM to DRAM with SECDED error correction), 2.17e-10 J per bit (solid-state drive to drive) and 8.52e-9 J per bit (hard disk to hard disk), that is 3.45e8 to 7.03e10 times the floor, because a silicon bit is a macroscopic object. Model calculations are labelled SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED. The deposit includes the paper PDF, the computation script (compute.py) that produces every number in the paper, and its output (results.json).
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225733311
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: