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arXiv:1606.03069 · Physical Review A

Inequivalence of correlation-based measures of non-Markovianity

Alaor Cervati Neto, Göktuğ Karpat, F. F. Fanchini

Published Sep 6, 2016• 20 citations
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Abstract

We conclusively show that the entanglement- and the mutual-information-based measures of quantum non-Markovianity are inequivalent. To this aim, we first analytically solve the optimization problem in the definition of the entanglement-based measure for a two-level system. We demonstrate that the optimal initial bipartite state of the open system and the ancillary is always given by one of the Bell states for any one-qubit dynamics. On top of this result, we present an explicit example dynamics where memory effects emerge according to the mutual-information-based measure, even though the time evolution remains memoryless with respect to the entanglement-based measure. Finally, we explain this disagreement between the two measures in terms of the information dynamics of the open system, exploring the accessible and inaccessible parts of information.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.94.032105

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We conclusively show that the entanglement- and the mutual-information-based measures of quantum non-Markovianity are inequivalent. To this aim, we first analytically solve the optimization problem in the definition of the entanglement-based measure for a two-level system. We demonstrate that the optimal initial bipartite state of the open system and the ancillary is always given by one of the Bell states for any one-qubit dynamics. On top of this result, we present an explicit example dynamics where memory effects emerge according to the mutual-information-based measure, even though the time evolution remains memoryless with respect to the entanglement-based measure. Finally, we explain this disagreement between the two measures in terms of the information dynamics of the open system, exploring the accessible and inaccessible parts of information.
In the study of open quantum systems, memory effects are usually ignored, and this leads to dynamical semigroups and Markovian dynamics. However, in practice, non-Markovian dynamics is the rule rather than the exception. With the recent emergence of quantum information theory, there is a flurry of investigations of non-Markovian dynamics, and several significant measures for non-Markovianity are introduced from various perspectives such as deviation from divisibility, information exchange between a system and its environment, or entanglement with the environment. In this work, by exploiting the correlations flow between a system and an arbitrary ancillary, we propose a considerably intuitive measure for non-Markovianity by use of correlations as quantified by the quantum mutual information rather than entanglement. The fundamental properties, physical significance, and differences and relations with existing measures for non-Markovianity are elucidated. The measure captures quite directly and deeply the characteristics of non-Markovianity from the perspective of information. A simplified version based on Jamio\l{}kowski-Choi isomorphism which encodes operations via bipartite states and does not involve any optimization is also proposed.
We investigate the ability of correlation measures to witness non-Markovian open-quantum-system dynamics. It is shown that the mutual information and any entanglement measure between the system and an ancilla do not witness all non-Markovian dynamics. A correlation measure is introduced, and it is proven that, in an enlarged setting with two ancillary systems, this measure detects almost all non-Markovian dynamics, except possibly a zero-measure set of dynamics that is nonbijective in finite time intervals. Our proof is constructive and provides different initial states detecting the non-Markovian evolutions. These states are all separable and some are arbitrarily close to a product state. A further advantage of the introduced correlation measure is that it can be efficiently computed through semidefinite programming.
Exchange of information between a quantum system and its surrounding environment plays a fundamental role in the study of the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here we discuss the role of the information exchange in the non-Markovian behavior of dynamical quantum processes following the decoherence approach, where we consider a quantum system that is initially correlated with its measurement apparatus, which in turn interacts with the environment. We introduce a way of looking at the information exchange between the system and environment using the quantum loss, which is shown to be closely related to the measure of non-Markovianity based on the quantum mutual information. We also extend the results of Fanchini et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 210402 (2014)] in several directions, providing a more detailed investigation of the use of the accessible information for quantifying the backflow of information from the environment to the system. Moreover, we reveal a clear conceptual relation between the entanglement- and mutual-information-based measures of non-Markovianity in terms of the quantum loss and accessible information. We compare different ways of studying the information flow in two theoretical examples. We also present experimental results on the investigation of the quantum loss and accessible information for a two-level system undergoing a zero temperature amplitude damping process. We use an optical approach that allows full access to the state of the environment.
Abstract The information encoded into an open quantum system that evolves under a Markovian dynamics is always monotonically non-increasing. Nonetheless, for a given quantifier of the information contained in the system, it is in general not clear if for all non-Markovian dynamics it is possible to observe a non-monotonic evolution of this quantity, namely a backflow. We address this problem by considering correlations of finite-dimensional bipartite systems. For this purpose, we consider a class of correlation measures and prove that if the dynamics is non-Markovian there exists at least one element from this class that provides a correlation backflow. Moreover, we provide a set of initial probe states that accomplish this witnessing task. This result provides the first one-to-one relation between non-Markovian quantum dynamics and correlation backflows. Finally, we introduce a measure of non-Markovianity.
Although a number of measures for quantum non-Markovianity have been proposed recently, it is still an open question whether these measures directly characterize the memory effect of the environment, i.e., the dependence of a quantum state on its past in a time evolution. In this paper, we present a criterion and propose a measure for non-Markovianity with clear physical interpretations of the memory effect. The non-Markovianity is defined by the inequality $T({t}_{2},{t}_{0})\ensuremath{\ne}T({t}_{2},{t}_{1})T({t}_{1},{t}_{0})$ in terms of memoryless dynamical map TTT introduced in this paper. This definition is conceptually distinct from that based on divisibility used by Rivas et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 050403 (2010)], whose violation is manifested by noncomplete positivity of the dynamical map. We demonstrate via a typical quantum process that without Markovian approximation, nonzero memory effects (non-Markovianity) always exist even if the non-Markovianity is zero by the other non-Markovianity measures.
We study a recently proposed measure for the quantification of quantum non-Markovianity in the dynamics of open systems which is based on the exchange of information between the open system and its environment. This measure relates the degree of memory effects to certain optimal initial state pairs featuring a maximal flow of information from the environment back to the open system. We rigorously prove that the states of these optimal pairs must lie on the boundary of the space of physical states and that they must be orthogonal. This implies that quantum memory effects are maximal for states which are initially distinguishable with certainty, having a maximal information content. Moreover, we construct an explicit example which demonstrates that optimal quantum states need not be pure states.