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arXiv:2510.20224

Non-Markovianity in Quantum Information Processing: Interplay with Quantum Error Mitigation

Suguru Endo, Hideaki Hakoshima, Tomohiro Shitara

Published Oct 23, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Non-Markovian dynamics are typically present in the dynamics of open quantum systems. Despite the rich structure of non-Markovian dynamics, their relevance to quantum information processing (QIP) has been rarely discussed. In this work, we demonstrate that the negativity of the dynamics, a characteristic of non-Markovian dynamics, naturally arises in quantum error correction (QEC) and quantum teleportation. The negativity in open quantum systems is naturally attributed to the information backflow from the environment. We partition the whole Hilbert space into the logical subsystem and the gauge subsystem. The logical subsystem stores the quantum information for QIP, while the gauge subsystem stores the information for recovery of the logical information, i.e., the syndrome measurement outcomes for quantum error correction and Bell measurement outcomes for successful teleportation. We then show that the negativity in quantum information processing appears as a consequence of the feedback operation based on the measurement outcomes of the gauge subsystem. Finally, we show that the negativity of non-Markovianity in QIP reduces the sampling cost of quantum error mitigation (QEM), shedding light on the importance of combination strategies of QEC and QEM in a practical QIP.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2510.20224

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Non-Markovian dynamics are typically present in the dynamics of open quantum systems. Despite the rich structure of non-Markovian dynamics, their relevance to quantum information processing (QIP) has been rarely discussed. In this work, we demonstrate that the negativity of the dynamics, a characteristic of non-Markovian dynamics, naturally arises in quantum error correction (QEC) and quantum teleportation. The negativity in open quantum systems is naturally attributed to the information backflow from the environment. We partition the whole Hilbert space into the logical subsystem and the gauge subsystem. The logical subsystem stores the quantum information for QIP, while the gauge subsystem stores the information for recovery of the logical information, i.e., the syndrome measurement outcomes for quantum error correction and Bell measurement outcomes for successful teleportation. We then show that the negativity in quantum information processing appears as a consequence of the feedback operation based on the measurement outcomes of the gauge subsystem. Finally, we show that the negativity of non-Markovianity in QIP reduces the sampling cost of quantum error mitigation (QEM), shedding light on the importance of combination strategies of QEC and QEM in a practical QIP.
Quantum error mitigation (QEM) has been proposed as an alternative method of quantum error correction to compensate errors in quantum systems without qubit overhead. While Markovian gate errors on digital quantum computers have been mainly considered previously, it is indispensable to discuss a relationship between QEM and non-Markovian errors because non-Markovian noise effects inevitably exist in most of the solid-state systems. In this work, we investigate the QEM for non-Markovian noise, and show that there is a clear relationship between costs for QEM and non-Markovian measures. As examples, we show several non-Markovian noise models to bridge a gap between our theoretical framework and concrete physical systems. This discovery may help in designing better QEM strategies for realistic quantum devices with non-Markovian environments.
A Markovian process of a system is defined classically as a process in which the future state of the system is fully determined by only its present state, not by its previous history. There have been several measures of non-Markovianity to quantify the degrees of non-Markovian effect in a process of an open quantum system based on information backflow from the environment to the system. However, the condition for the witness of the system information backflow does not coincide with the classical definition of a Markovian process. Recently, a new measure with a condition that coincides with the classical definition in the relevant limit has been proposed. Here, we focus on the new definition (measure) for quantum non-Markovian processes, and characterize the Markovian condition as a quantum process that has no information backflow through the reduced environment state (IBTRES) and no system-environment correlation effect (SECE). The action of IBTRES produces non-Markovian effects by flowing the information of quantum operations performed by an experimenter at earlier times back to the system through the environment, while the SECE can produce non-Markovian effect without carrying any earlier quantum operation information. We give the necessary and sufficient conditions for no IBTRES and no SECE, respectively, and show that a process is Markovian if and only if it has no IBTRES and no SECE. The quantitative measures and algorithms for calculating non-Markovianity, IBTRES, and solely SECE are explicitly presented.
Quantum memory effects can be qualitatively understood as a consequence of an environment-to-system backflow of information. Here, we analyze and compare how this concept is interpreted and implemented in different approaches to quantum non-Markovianity. We study a nonoperational approach, defined by the distinguishability between two system states characterized by different initial conditions, and an operational approach, which is defined by the correlation between different outcomes associated to successive measurement processes performed over the system of interest. The differences, limitations, and vantages of each approach are characterized in detail by considering diverse system-environment models and dynamics. As a specific example, we study a non-Markovian depolarizing map induced by the interaction of the system of interest with an environment characterized by incoherent and coherent self-dynamics.
The basic features of the dynamics of open quantum systems, such as the dissipation of energy, the decay of coherences, the relaxation to an equilibrium or non-equilibrium stationary state, and the transport of excitations in complex structures are of central importance in many applications of quantum mechanics. The theoretical description, analysis and control of non-Markovian quantum processes play an important role in this context. While in a Markovian process an open system irretrievably loses information to its surroundings, non-Markovian processes feature a flow of information from the environment back to the open system, which implies the presence of memory effects and represents the key property of non-Markovian quantum behavior. Here, we review recent ideas developing a general mathematical definition for non-Markoviantiy in the quantum regime and a measure for the degree of memory effects in the dynamics of open systems which are based on the exchange of information between system and environment. We further study the dynamical effects induced by the presence of system-environment correlations in the total initial state and design suitable methods to detect such correlations through local measurements on the open system.
Error-correcting codes were originally developed to protect both classical computation and communication from noise. Quantum error correction (QEC) adapts these ideas to the quantum setting, where the no-cloning theorem and continuous-variable error models raise qualitatively new difficulties and underlie schemes for fault-tolerant quantum computation. In contrast, quantum error mitigation (QEM) offers practical techniques to reduce noise effects in quantum devices without the significant hardware overhead required by QEC. This work examines the task of QEM from several perspectives. Using some intuitions built upon classical and quantum communication scenarios, we clarify some fundamental distinctions between QEC and QEM. We then discuss the implications of noise invertibility for QEM and give an explicit construction called Drazin inverse for non-invertible noise, which is trace preserving while the commonly used Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse may not be. Finally, we study the consequences of having an imperfect knowledge about the noise and derive conditions when noise can be reduced using QEM.
Reducing the impact of errors and decoherence in near-term quantum computers, such as noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, is critical for their practical implementation. These factors significantly limit the applicability of quantum algorithms, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of their physical origins to establish effective error mitigation strategies. In this study, we present a non-Markovian model of quantum state evolution and a quantum error mitigation cost function tailored for NISQ devices interacting with an environment represented by a set of simple harmonic oscillators as a noise source. Employing the projection operator formalism and both advanced and retarded propagators in time, we derive the reduced-density operator for the output quantum states in a time-convolutionless form by solving the quantum Liouville equation. We examine the output quantum state fluctuations for both identity and controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate operations in two-qubit operations using a range of input states. Subsequently, these results are compared with experimental data from ion-trap and superconducting quantum computing systems to estimate the crucial parameters of the cost functions for quantum error mitigation. Our findings reveal that the cost function for quantum error mitigation increases as the coupling strength between the quantum system and its environment intensifies. This study underscores the significance of non-Markovian models in understanding quantum state evolution and highlights the practical implications of the quantum error mitigation cost function when assessing experimental results from NISQ devices.