All-optical design for inherently energy-conserving reversible gates and circuits

As energy efficiency becomes a paramount issue in this day and age, reversible computing may serve as a critical step towards energy conservation in information technology. The inputs of reversible computing elements define the outputs and vice versa. Some reversible gates such as the Fredkin gate are also universal; that is, they may be used to produce any logic operation. It is possible to find physical representations for the information, so that when processed with reversible logic, the energy of the output is equal to the energy of the input. It is suggested that there may be devices that will do that without applying any additional power. Here, we present a formalism that may be used to produce any reversible logic gate. We implement this method over an optical design of the Fredkin gate, which utilizes only optical elements that inherently conserve energy.