Dynamical Landauer Principle: Quantifying Information Transmission by Thermodynamics

Energy transfer and information transmission are two fundamental aspects of nature. They are seemingly unrelated, while recent findings suggest that a deep connection between them is to be discovered. This amounts to asking: We answer this question positively by showing that, for a broad class of classical communication tasks, a quantum dynamics’ ability to transmit n bits of classical information its ability to transmit n units of energy in a thermodynamic task. This finding not only provides an analytical correspondence between information transmission and energy extraction tasks, but also quantifies classical communication by thermodynamics. Furthermore, our findings uncover the of Landauer’s principle, showing the strong link between transmitting information and energy. In the asymptotic regime, our results further provide thermodynamic meanings for the well-known Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland Theorem in quantum communication theory.