We study the efficacy of the two recently introduced witnesses of non-Markovianity, namely that based on temporal correlations in pseudo-density matrix and temporal steering correlations in detecting information backflow. We show, through specific counterexamples taken from existing literature, that they can witness a process to be non-Markovian where trace distance and entropic distinguishability measures may fail. We further show that, since the pseudo-density matrix is directly related to the Choi matrix of a channel via the partial transpose, it can be generalized to quantify the total quantum memory in any indivisible process. Moreover, we make an interesting observation that temporal steerable correlations-based measure may not capture eternal non-Markovianity hence may not be proportional to Choi-matrix-based methods, while pseudo-density matrix-based measures introduced in this work faithfully capture eternal non-Markovianity. Our work highlights important distinction between weak and strong forms of quantum direct cause in quantum mechanics when applied to open system dynamics.
We study the efficacy of the two recently introduced witnesses of non-Markovianity, namely that based on temporal correlations in pseudo-density matrix and temporal steering correlations in detecting information backflow. We show, through specific counterexamples taken from existing literature, that they can witness a process to be non-Markovian where trace distance and entropic distinguishability measures may fail. We further show that, since the pseudo-density matrix is directly related to the Choi matrix of a channel via the partial transpose, it can be generalized to quantify the total quantum memory in any indivisible process. Moreover, we make an interesting observation that temporal steerable correlations-based measure may not capture eternal non-Markovianity hence may not be proportional to Choi-matrix-based methods, while pseudo-density matrix-based measures introduced in this work faithfully capture eternal non-Markovianity. Our work highlights important distinction between weak and strong forms of quantum direct cause in quantum mechanics when applied to open system dynamics.
Non-Markovian effects in open quantum system dynamics usually manifest the backflow of information from the environment to the system, indicating complete-positive divisibility breaking of the dynamics. We provide a criterion for witnessing such non-Markovian dynamics exhibiting information backflow, based on partial moments of Choi matrices. The moment condition determined by the positive semi-definiteness of a matrix does not hold for a Choi state describing non-Markovian dynamics. We then present some explicit examples in support of our proposed non-Markovianity detection scheme. Finally, a moment-based measure of non-Markovianity for unital dynamics is formulated.
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.
Non-Markovian effects in an open-system dynamics are usually associated to information backflows from the environment to the system. However, the way these backflows manifest and how to detect them is unclear. A natural approach is to study the backflow in terms of the correlations the evolving system displays with another unperturbed system during the dynamics. In this work, we study the power of this approach to witness non-Markovian dynamics using different correlation measures. We identify simple dynamics where the failure of completely positive divisibility is in one-to-one correspondence with a correlation backflow. We then focus on specific correlation measures, such as those based on entanglement and the mutual information, and identify their strengths and limitations. We conclude with a study of a recently introduced correlation measures based on state distinguishability and see how, for these measures, adding an extra auxiliary system enlarges the set of detectable non-Markovian dynamics.
Non-Markovian effects due to quantum memory in the dynamics of open systems typically correspond to information backflows from the surrounding environment to the system. We propose a witness to quantify the non-Markovianity of quantum evolutions using the Bhattacharyya distance (BD), a specific quantum statistical distance. This witness has the advantage of not requiring the calculation of the evolved density matrix and only computes through the initial and final states of the system, therefore leading to the improvement of quantum metrology. It means that we calculate the quantum angle between two states to detect non-Markovian effects. This proposal is investigated by considering several instances of open quantum systems, such as two and three-level atoms interacting in single and two-mode fields, respectively, and two effective two-level atoms interacting locally with two independent environments. We demonstrate that the suggested BD-based non-Markovianity witness identifies memory effects, consistent with well-established witnesses based on Bures distance, quantum Fisher information, and Hilbert-Schmidt speed, showing sensitivity to information backflows.
We analyze and compare different measures for the degree of non-Markovianity in the dynamics of open quantum systems. These measures are based on the distinguishability of quantum states, which is quantified, on the one hand, by the trace distance or, more generally, by the trace norm of the Helstrom matrix and, on the other hand, by entropic quantifiers: the Jensen-Shannon divergence and the Holevo or quantum skew divergence. We explicitly construct a qubit dynamics for which the trace-norm-based non-Markovianity measure is nonzero, while all the entropic measures turn out to be zero. This leads to the surprising conclusion that the non-Markovianity measure which employs the trace norm of the Helstrom matrix is strictly stronger than all entropic non-Markovianity measures.
In the dynamics of open quantum systems, information may propagate in time through either the system or the environment, giving rise to Markovian and non-Markovian temporal correlations, respectively. However, despite their notable coexistence in most physical situations, it is not yet clear how these two quantities may limit the existence of one another. Here, we address this issue by deriving several inequalities relating the temporal correlations of general multitime quantum processes. The dynamics are described by process tensors, and the correlations are quantified by the mutual information between subsystems of their Choi states. First, we prove a set of upper bounds to the non-Markovianity of a process given the degree of Markovianity in each of its steps. This immediately implies a nontrivial maximum value for the non-Markovianity of any process, independent of its Markovianity. Finally, we determine how the non-Markovianity limits the amount of total temporal correlations that could be present in a given process. These results show that, although any multitime process must pay a price in total correlations to have a given amount of non-Markovianity, this price vanishes exponentially with the number of steps of the process, while the maximum non-Markovianity grows only linearly. This implies that even a highly non-Markovian process might be arbitrarily close to having the maximum amount of total correlations if it has a sufficiently large number of steps.