  We present an experiment in which a one-bit memory is constructed, using a
system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well
potential. We measure the amount of heat dissipated to erase a bit and we
establish that in the limit of long erasure cycles the mean dissipated heat
saturates at the Landauer bound, i.e. the minimal quantity of heat necessarily
produced to delete a classical bit of information. This result demonstrates the
intimate link between information theory and thermodynamics. To stress this
connection we also show that a detailed Jarzynski equality is verified,
retrieving the Landauer's bound independently of the work done on the system.
The experimental details are presented and the experimental errors carefully
discussed
