The Power of Forgetting - Patrick Hayden

Despite Landauer's early lesson that erasure plays a fundamental role in understanding the physics of information, quantum information theorists have been surprisingly slow to embrace erasure as a fundamental primitive. Over the past year, however, it has become clear that a detailed understanding of how difficult it is to erase correlations leads to a nearly complete synthesis and simplification of the known results of asymptotic quantum information theory. In fact, surprisingly many all the tasks of interest, from distilling high-quality entanglement to sending quantum data through a noisy medium to many receivers, can be understood as variants of erasure. I'll sketch these developments before making some speculations on applications to real physical systems.