Well merging

Red arrows are lossy/dissipative/irreversible well merging processes. Follow the spiral of green arrows to go from a 0 to a 1 (or vice versa) in a lossless/nondissipative/reversible/adiabatic manner.

By smartly crafting the temporal trajectory of the potential wells for tool-tip and work-piece-surface mechanosynthesis can be made vastly more efficient than "normal chemistry".

This page is about …

• … energetic losses being incurred when potential energy wells of a bi-stable system are merged.
  
• … changing the state of a system without needing to expend energy (in the limit of slow speeds).
  

Contexts

Logic

Changing bits from 0 to 1 or vice versa losslessly in reversible logic
possibly nanomechanical logic like e.g. rod logic.

Building & Energy

Depositong an atom from a tooltip to a workpiece losslessly.
Breaking and forming chemical bonds losslessly in a chemomechanical converter system.

Limits to losslessness

Of course this is all merely near losslessly.
As there are are other dissipation mechanisms like dynamic friction
and dissipation pertaining to reciprocative motions.
Plus there is an absolute minimum amount to dissipate to define a local arrow of time for the nanomachinery.
Preventing it from running backwards occasionally.

Remaining dissipation in the adiabatic case

Regarding the absolute minimum energy needed for a system to operate forward at finite nonzero speeds:
This is a matter of dissipating enough energy per time to gain a sufficiently defined arrow of time.
In the context of chemomechanical converters, mechanochemistry and mechanosynthesis
a way to get down to the absolute minimum mandatory amount of energy dissipation may be
there process defined on the page dissipation sharing.

Related

• Reversible logic
• Piezomechanosynthesis & Chemomechanical converter

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• Arrow of time
• Dissipation sharing