Required package for a thermodynamic successor

A successor claiming a heat, work, or reusable-memory reset cost must specify at least:

1. the physical memory, logical encoding, and Hamiltonian, including degeneracies and endpoint Hamiltonians;

2. the reservoir, its initial state, temperature, size, and the meaning of any large-reservoir limit;

3. initial correlations, purifications, and available classical or quantum side information;

4. admissible controls, switching protocol, work storage, and actuator accounting;

5. the heat and work sign conventions and the complete energy-balance equation;

6. every success and failure branch, without hidden postselection or omitted branches;

7. the input class and whether the reset is uniform over unknown reference-entangled inputs;

8. the reset accuracy and the metric in which it is certified;

9. the resources consumed, including blank registers, fuel, catalysts, apparatus records, and correlations;

10. restoration or disposal costs needed for repeatable operation;

11. the finite-time, quasistatic, or asymptotic regime and any order of limits;

12. a theorem connecting the complete implementation to the exact observable channel or its declared reference-preserving approximation.

These data are needed to pose the implementation problem. They do not themselves prove optimality. An optimization claim must additionally specify and exhaust its admissible implementation class.

In particular, the swap construction in Proposition prop:no-landauer-from-channel consumes a blank resource. It cannot be advertised as cyclic erasure at zero total cost without restoring that resource.