DATE2025.12.01 #Press Releases

Achieving the Fundamental Limit of Energetic Costs Through “Optimal Transport”

-A breakthrough leading to new design principles for energy-efficient information processing-

Summary

When we move something, it incurs a thermodynamic cost of energy, and this cost cannot be reduced below a certain minimum. The same applies to information processing in computers. For instance, no matter how ingenious the method, there is always a minimum energetic cost to erasing information that cannot be reduced below the lower bound. This lower bound varies depending on the speed of the operation; however, until now, it could only be demonstrated experimentally for infinitely slow operations.

In this study, the research team—graduate student Shingo Oikawa (at the time of research), Assistant Professor Yohei Nakayama, and Professor Shoichi Toriyabe from the Graduate School of Engineering at Tohoku University, together with Professor Takahiro Sagawa from the Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo; and Associate Professor Sosuke Ito from the Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo—have developed a new technology to control microparticles at high speed and with high precision using optics. They achieved an information erasure at the theoretically minimal energetic cost within finite time, predicted by the mathematical framework “optimal transport theory”.

This achievement marks the first experimental demonstration of reaching the fundamental energetic cost bound in a finite-time, non-quasi-static regime. These findings are expected to inform the design principles of next-generation information processing technologies that are substantially more energy efficient.

The result was published on December 1, 2025 in the international journal Nature Communications.

Figure：(a) Scanning optical tweezers. High-speed scanning of a laser creates arbitrary potential shapes. (b) By dynamically varying the potential shape over time, the probability distribution of particle positions was controlled, achieving optimal transport.

Links

Tohoku University, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo ,  Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)

Journals

Journal name	Nature Communications
Title of paper	Experimentally achieving minimal dissipation via thermodynamically optimal transport