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arXiv:1810.03829 · Physical Review A

Non-Markovianity of photon dynamics in a birefringent crystal

Kai-Hung Wang, Shih-Hsuan Chen, Yu‐Cheng Lin, Che‐Ming Li

Published Oct 29, 2018• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The way a principle system and its environment interact characterizes the non-Markovianity of the dynamics. Herein, we investigate the non-Markovian dynamics of photon polarization in a birefringent crystal. We consider the so-called ``quantity of quantum-mechanical process'' first defined by Hsieh et al. [Sci. Rep. 7, 13588 (2017)]. The non-Markovianity of the photon dynamics is evaluated by examining the quantity of quantum-mechanical process varying with time, and the difference between the quantity of quantum-mechanical process in a complete dynamics and that in a process composed of two subprocesses. We show that all of the processes identified as Markovian in the seminal study of Liu et al. [Nat. Phys. 7, 931 (2011)] can actually be identified as non-Markovian. The presented method enables us to classify non-Markovianity in the dynamical processes that are classified as Markovian by existing verification criteria. Overall, the results confirm the feasibility of performing the experimental characterization of photon dynamics using an all-optical setup and provide a useful insight into enhancing the accuracy and control of quantum system designs for quantum engineering applications.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.98.043850

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The way a principle system and its environment interact characterizes the non-Markovianity of the dynamics. Herein, we investigate the non-Markovian dynamics of photon polarization in a birefringent crystal. We consider the so-called ``quantity of quantum-mechanical process'' first defined by Hsieh et al. [Sci. Rep. 7, 13588 (2017)]. The non-Markovianity of the photon dynamics is evaluated by examining the quantity of quantum-mechanical process varying with time, and the difference between the quantity of quantum-mechanical process in a complete dynamics and that in a process composed of two subprocesses. We show that all of the processes identified as Markovian in the seminal study of Liu et al. [Nat. Phys. 7, 931 (2011)] can actually be identified as non-Markovian. The presented method enables us to classify non-Markovianity in the dynamical processes that are classified as Markovian by existing verification criteria. Overall, the results confirm the feasibility of performing the experimental characterization of photon dynamics using an all-optical setup and provide a useful insight into enhancing the accuracy and control of quantum system designs for quantum engineering applications.
Abstract A Markovian quantum process can be arbitrarily divided into two or more legitimate completely‐positive (CP) subprocesses. When at least one non‐CP process exists among the divided processes, the dynamics is considered non‐Markovian. However, how to utilize minimum experimental efforts, without examining all process input states and using entanglement resources, to identify or measure non‐Markovianity is still being determined. Herein, a method is proposed to quantify non‐CP processes for identifying and measuring non‐Markovianity without the burden of state optimization and entanglement. This relies on the non‐CP processes as new quantum process capabilities and can be systematically implemented by quantum process tomography. Additionally, an approach for witnessing non‐Markovianity by analyzing at least four system states without process tomography is provided. It is faithfully demonstrated that this method can be explicitly implemented using all‐optical setups and applied to identify the non‐Markovianity of single‐photon and two‐photon dynamics in birefringent crystals. The results also can be used to explore non‐Markovianity in other dynamical systems where process or state tomography is implementable.
Non-Markovian processes have recently become a central topic in the study of open quantum systems. We realize experimentally non-Markovian decoherence processes of single photons by combining time delay and evolution in a polarization-maintaining optical fiber. The experiment allows the identification of the process with strongest memory effects as well as the determination of a recently proposed measure for the degree of quantum non-Markovianity based on the exchange of information between the open system and its environment. Our results show that an experimental quantification of memory in quantum processes is indeed feasible which could be useful in the development of quantum memory and communication devices.
We experimentally observed in an optical setup and using full tomography process the so-called weak non-Markovian dynamics of a qubit [1]. This was done implementing the collisional model proposed in [2] to investigate the non- Markovian dynamics of an open quantum system interacting with a carefully controlled environment state. We also observed the transition from weak to strong (essentially) non-Markovianity. In our all-optical setup, a single photon system, initially entangled in polarization with an ancilla, is made to interact with a sequence of liquid crystal retarders driven by proper electric pulses, which simulates the environment. Depending on how the voltage is applied on each liquid crystal, it will work as a half-wave plate with different orientations. Then, by changing properly the parameters of the qubit-environment interactions, the system dynamics can suffer a transition from weak to strong non-Markovianity. In the strong regime, the full reconstruction of the entangled state was made by single entanglement witness between system and ancilla, showing a backflow of information, while, in the weak regime, given the contractive unital map feature, we can only measure the dynamics by a full process tomography analysis, searching for the violation of the divisibility completely positive map criterion, what was done successfully.
Abstract Established methods for characterizing quantum information processes do not capture non-Markovian (history-dependent) behaviors that occur in real systems. These methods model a quantum process as a fixed map on the state space of a predefined system of interest. Such a map averages over the system’s environment, which may retain some effect of its past interactions with the system and thus have a history-dependent influence on the system. Although the theory of non-Markovian quantum dynamics is currently an active area of research, a systematic characterization method based on a general representation of non-Markovian dynamics has been lacking. In this article we present a systematic method for experimentally characterizing the dynamics of open quantum systems. Our method, which we call quantum process identification (QPI), is based on a general theoretical framework which relates the (non-Markovian) evolution of a system over an extended period of time to a time-local (Markovian) process involving the system and an effective environment. In practical terms, QPI uses time-resolved tomographic measurements of a quantum system to construct a dynamical model with as many dynamical variables as are necessary to reproduce the evolution of the system. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that QPI can be used to characterize qubit operations with non-Markovian errors arising from realistic dynamics including control drift, coherent leakage, and coherent interaction with material impurities.
The modeling and analysis of the dynamics of complex systems often requires to employ non-Markovian stochastic processes. While there is a clear and well-established mathematical definition for non-Markovianity in the case of classical systems, the extension to the quantum regime recently caused a vivid debate, leading to many different proposals for the characterization and quantification of memory effects in the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here, we derive a mathematical representation for the non-Markovianity measure based on the exchange of information between the open system and its environment, which reveals the locality and universality of non-Markovianity in the quantum state space and substantially simplifies its numerical and experimental determination. We further illustrate the application of this representation by means of an all-optical experiment which allows the measurement of the degree of memory effects in a photonic quantum process with high accuracy.
Non-Markovianity has recently attracted large interest due to significant advances in its characterization and its exploitation for quantum information processing. However, up to now, only non-Markovian regimes featuring environment to system backflow of information (strong non-Markovianity) have been experimentally simulated. In this work, using an all-optical setup we simulate and observe the so-called weak non-Markovian dynamics. Through full process tomography, we experimentally demonstrate that the dynamics of a qubit can be non-Markovian despite an always increasing correlation between the system and its environment which, in our case, denotes no information backflow. We also show the transition from the weak to the strong regime by changing a single parameter in the environmental state, leading us to a better understanding of the fundamental features of non-Markovianity.