Information Acquisition at the Nanoscale: Fundamental Considerations

Reliable extraction of information from a physical system requires some combination of redundancy, state distinguishibility, and access time. This has obvious implications for any prospective nanoelectronic technology that would require rapid extraction of information from small numbers of electrons through nanoscale access volumes. In this work, we explore this issue through consideration of fundamental physical limits on information acquisition from electronic systems. We outline our approach and present model calculations that illustrate loss of accessible information at nanoscale access volumes and low particle densities in a simple tight-binding molecular wire. This approach, fully developed, could provide both useful physical insight and practical tools for the assessment of emerging electronic information processing technologies.