Reversible Computation Using Swap Reactions on a Surface

Tatiana Brailovskaya, Gokul Gowri, Sean Yu, Erik Winfree

Abstract: Chemical reaction networks (CRNs) and DNA strand displacement systems have shown potential for implementing logically and physically reversible computation. It has been shown that CRNs on a surface allow highly scalable and parallelizable computation. In this paper, we demonstrate that simple rearrangement reactions on a surface, which we refer to as swaps, are capable of physically reversible Boolean computation. We present designs for elementary logic gates, a method for constructing arbitrary feedforward digital circuits, and a proof of their correctness.