Experimentally probing Landauer's principle in the quantum many-body regime

Landauer's principle connects information theory and thermodynamics by relating a system's entropy change during a process to the average energy dissipated to its surroundings. Though it's often applied to the erasure of a single bit, Landauer's principle extends to describe irreversibility in out-of-equilibrium processes, including complex quantum many-body systems. In such systems, the entropy change of the system and energy dissipation can be further broken down into components involving quantum mutual information and differences in the environment's relative entropies.

Here, we explore Landauer's principle experimentally in a quantum many-body setting using a quantum field simulator of ultracold Bose gases. Through dynamic tomographic reconstruction, we trace the quantum field's evolution after a global mass quench from a Klein-Gordon to a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid model, examining information-theoretic contributions to Landauer's principle across different system-environment partitions. Our results align with theoretical predictions and are interpreted through a semi-classical quasiparticle approach, highlighting the potential of ultracold atom-based quantum field simulators for studying quantum thermodynamics.