Memory does not last forever

A cura di Luca Gammaitoni (University of Perugia )

martedì 24 mag 2022, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edifcio G. Marconi)

The act of remembering is of fundamental importance in human life. Not only do manmade objects such as monuments and landscapes require maintenance to counterbalance their deterioration, but also biological systems are subject to the never-ending task of preserving shapes and functionalities by fighting the universal tendency of entropy to increase. In this talk we discuss a general stochastic dynamic model that describes the time evolution of a digital memory. We present theoretical results and an experiment on a microelectromechanical system, to evaluate the minimum energy required to preserve one bit of information over time. Two main conclusions are drawn: (i) in principle, the energetic cost to preserve information for a fixed time duration with a given error probability can be arbitrarily reduced if the refresh procedure is performed often enough, and (ii) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle sets an upper bound on the memory lifetime.

Link zoom: https://uniroma1.zoom.us/j/82330282429?pwd=MktKdmlkSUxxdXlraFhKSHhJTDZnUT09