Landauer’s principle formulated in 1961 states that logical irreversibility implies physical irreversibility and demonstrated that information is physical.
Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.
In this framework, it is shown that the mass of a bit of information at room temperature (300K) is 3.19 × 10-38 Kg.
To test the hypothesis we propose here an experiment, predicting that the mass of a data storage device would increase by a small amount when is full of digital information relative to its mass in erased state.
For 1Tb device the estimated mass change is 2.5 × 10-25 Kg.
Read the full study: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.512379