Researchers have succeeded in measuring how energy dissipates in quantum dots by quantifying the entropy they produce. The work, by a team at Stanford University in the US, could help in the optimization of real-world nanoscale devices used in applications such as quantum memories and information processing. Technologies like memory storage devices and information processors are intrinsically dissipative, explains materials scientist and engineer Aaron Lindenberg, who led this new study. Energy is lost as heat in many ways but at a fundamental level, this arises from the Landauer principle, which defines a lower limit for these energy costs. “When physical or computational processes evolve non-quasi-statically – for example, over a finite amount of time and out-of-equilibrium, the energy costs increase.…