Quantifying non-Markovianity is a fundamental problem in the theory of open quantum systems, as it is essential for exploiting environmental memory as a resource in quantum technologies. Existing resource-theoretic and operational quantifiers, however, generally require complete knowledge of the intermediate dynamical map and are therefore experimentally demanding. Here, we develop a witness-based framework for the quantification of non-Markovianity that bypasses complete reconstruction of the Choi state associated with the intermediate dynamical map. We first show that every non-Markovianity witness provides a certifiable lower bound on the geometric resource measure of non-Markovianity and identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which this bound is tight. Motivated by the fact that non-positive-semidefinite witnesses are generally difficult to measure in real experimental scenario, we then focus on positive-semidefinite witnesses, which admit a natural implementation as positive operator valued measure (POVM) elements. We prove that every positive witness yields a certified lower bound on the Rivas--Huelga--Plenio (RHP) measure, thereby establishing a complete hierarchy connecting witness-based quantification, the RHP measure, and the geometric distance measure. Applying our framework to amplitude-damping and general Pauli dynamics, we find that the optimal positive witnesses reduce to simple Bell-parity projectors. Furthermore, we show that the resulting witness values can be obtained directly from a small number of experimentally accessible correlation measurements, thereby eliminating the need for complete Choi-state reconstruction and providing an efficient and experimentally feasible approach for the quantification of non-Markovianity in open quantum systems.
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Quantifying non-Markovianity is a fundamental problem in the theory of open quantum systems, as it is essential for exploiting environmental memory as a resource in quantum technologies. Existing resource-theoretic and operational quantifiers, however, generally require complete knowledge of the intermediate dynamical map and are therefore experimentally demanding. Here, we develop a witness-based framework for the quantification of non-Markovianity that bypasses complete reconstruction of the Choi state associated with the intermediate dynamical map. We first show that every non-Markovianity witness provides a certifiable lower bound on the geometric resource measure of non-Markovianity and identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which this bound is tight. Motivated by the fact that non-positive-semidefinite witnesses are generally difficult to measure in real experimental scenario, we then focus on positive-semidefinite witnesses, which admit a natural implementation as positive operator valued measure (POVM) elements. We prove that every positive witness yields a certified lower bound on the Rivas--Huelga--Plenio (RHP) measure, thereby establishing a complete hierarchy connecting witness-based quantification, the RHP measure, and the geometric distance measure. Applying our framework to amplitude-damping and general Pauli dynamics, we find that the optimal positive witnesses reduce to simple Bell-parity projectors. Furthermore, we show that the resulting witness values can be obtained directly from a small number of experimentally accessible correlation measurements, thereby eliminating the need for complete Choi-state reconstruction and providing an efficient and experimentally feasible approach for the quantification of non-Markovianity in open quantum systems.
Determining the conditions under which positive operator-valued measures (POVMs), the most general class of quantum measurements, outperform projective measurements remains a challenging and largely unresolved problem. Of particular interest are projectively simulable POVMs, which can be realized through probabilistic mixtures of projective measurements, and therefore offer no advantage over projective schemes. Characterizing the boundary between simulable and non-simulable POVMs is, however, a difficult task, and existing tools either fail to scale efficiently, provide limited experimental feasibility or work only for specific POVMs. Here, we introduce and demonstrate a general method to certify non-simulability of a POVM by introducing a complete hierarchy of semidefinite programs. It provides upper bounds on the non-simulability measure of critical visibility of arbitrary POVMs which are tight in many cases and outperform previously known criteria. We experimentally certify the non-simulability of two- and three-dimensional POVMs using a trapped-ion qudit quantum processor by constructing non-simulability witnesses and introduce a modification of our framework that makes them robust against state preparation errors. Finally, we extend our results to the setting where an additional ancilla system is available.
The quantification and characterization of non-Markovian dynamics in quantum systems is an essential endeavor both for the theory of open quantum systems and for a deeper understanding of the effects of non-Markovian noise on quantum technologies. Here, we introduce the robustness of non-Markovianity, an operationally-motivated, optimization-free measure that quantifies the minimum amount of Markovian noise that can be mixed with a non-Markovian evolution before it becomes Markovian. We show that this quantity is a bonafide non-Markovianity measure, since it is faithful, convex, and monotonic under composition with Markovian channels. A two-fold operational interpretation of this measure is provided, with the robustness measure quantifying an advantage in both a state discrimination and a channel discrimination task. Furthermore, we provide a closed-form analytical expression for this measure and show that, quite remarkably, the robustness measure is exactly equal to half the Rivas-Huelga-Plenio (RHP) measure [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{105}, 050403 (2010)]. As a result, we provide a direct operational meaning to the RHP measure while endowing the robustness measure with the physical characterizations of the RHP measure.
We introduce an operational measure of nonclassicality for qubit systems based on the violation of Kolmogorov consistency conditions in sequential measurements. In contrast to previous work by Milz et al.~\cite{Milz-2020}, who characterized classicality via NCGD maps, and Sakuldee et al.~\cite{Sakuldee-2022a, Sakuldee-2022b}, who studied quantum correlations under measurement disturbance, our witness explicitly quantifies nonclassicality in terms of the POVM unsharpness parameter az. For projective measurements on an initially diagonal state, the witness vanishes identically, showing that such measurements cannot reveal nonclassicality. However, by generalizing to positive operator-valued measures (POVMs), we find that non-projective measurements can reveal nonclassicality even for diagonal initial states. We derive explicit expressions for the witness for general initial states, including coherences, and show that its maximum value is 1/4, which is a new result achieved for unbiased POVMs, maximal dephasing, and equal initial populations. Our results connect Kolmogorov consistency, Leggett-Garg inequalities, and POVMs, providing an experimentally accessible tool for detecting nonclassicality in qubit systems with potential applications in quantum technology certification.
The dynamics of an open quantum system can be fully described and tomographically reconstructed if the experimenter has complete control over the system of interest. Most real-world experiments do not fulfill this assumption, and the amount of control is restricted by the respective experimental setup. That is, the set of performable manipulations of the system is limited. In this paper, we provide a general reconstruction scheme that yields an operationally well-defined description of non-Markovian quantum dynamics for a large class of realistic experimental situations. The resultant ``restricted'' descriptor for the process, surprisingly, does not have the property of complete positivity. Based on these restricted dynamics, we construct witnesses for correlations and the presence of memory effects. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework for the two important cases where the set of performable operations comprises only unitary operations or projective measurements, respectively, and show that it provides a powerful tool for the description of quantum control experiments.
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.
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.