The Landauer Principle in quantum statistical mechanics

In a celebrated 1961 paper, Landauer formulated a fundamental lower bound on the energy dissipated by computation processes. Since then, there has been many attempts to formalize, generalize and contradict Landauer's analysis. The situation became even worse with the advent of quantum computing. In a recent enlightening article, Reeb and Wolf sets the game into the framework of quantum statistical mechanics, and finally gave a precise mathematical formulation of Landauer's bound. I will discuss parts of this analysis and present some extensions of it that were obtained in a joint work with V. Jaksic.