Quantum's delete freeze

Science - Pete Wilton | 02 Jun 11. Erasing data, rather like cleaning a house, should be hard, hot work. But now a team including Oxford University's Vlatko Vedral have shown that, in the quantum world at least, it doesn't always have to be. They report in this week's Nature that, under certain conditions, deleting data held in a quantum computer could actually cool the environment down rather than heating it up. 'Everyone who has ever worked with a computer knows that they get hotter the more we use them,' Vlatko writes in Scientific American . 'Physicist Rolf Landauer argued that this needs to be so, elevating the observation to the level of a principle,' Vlatko comments. 'The principle states that in order to erase one bit of information, we need to increase the entropy of the environment by at least as much.