Within this context, Meuffels and Soni pointed to a fundamental thermodynamic principle: Non-volatile information storage requires the existence of free-energy barriers that separate the distinct internal memory states of a system from each other; otherwise, one would be faced with an "indifferent" situation, and the system would arbitrarily fluctuate from one memory state to another just under the influence of thermal fluctuations. When unprotected against thermal fluctuations, the internal memory states exhibit some diffusive dynamics, which causes state degradation. The free-energy barriers must therefore be high enough to ensure a low bit-error probability of bit operation. Consequently, there is always a lower limit of energy requirement – depending on the required bit-error probability – for intentionally changing a bit value in any memory device.