Monte Carlo calculation of the mean work required to drive a bistable system

The mean work required to drive a bistable system from one equilibrium state to another is calculated by using a Langevin simulation combined with Monte Carlo sampling. The resulting work depends not only on the proposal form but also on the temperature, because the particle subjected to thermal fluctuation passes over the barrier during a finite time. This shows that the mean work of a periodic signal done on a particle in a double-well potential is a non-monotonic function of the temperature when the energetic barrier is encountered. By applying this to information erasure in a Brownian computer, it is discovered that the work dissipated into the environment for 1-bit information erasure from two states to a single state can be minimized at a finite temperature.