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Physical Review A

Quantifying non-Markovianity via correlations

Shunlong Luo, Shuangshuang Fu, Hongting Song

Published Oct 8, 2012• 353 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.86.044101

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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.
With the development of quantum-information theory, there has been a flurry of investigations of quantum non-Markovian dynamics, and several significant measures for such dynamics have been proposed from various perspectives, such as the breakdown of dynamical divisibility, increase in the distinguishability between quantum states, increase in correlations between the system and an arbitrary ancillary, and so on. Motivated by the idea of exploiting the information content of parameters encoded in initial states, we propose a conceptually simple and physically intuitive characterization for non-Markovianity with the help of a quantum-Fisher-information matrix. The basic features are illustrated through several examples, and relations with other approaches are elucidated. A hierarchial aspect of quantum non-Markovianity is revealed.
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.
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.
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.
Non-Markovian evolution in open quantum systems is often characterized in terms of the backflow of information from environment to system and is thus an important facet in investigating the performance and robustness of quantum information protocols. In this work, we explore non-Markovianity through the breakdown of monotonicity of a metrological figure of merit, called the quantum interferometric power, which is based on the minimal quantum Fisher information obtained by local unitary evolution of one part of the system, and can be interpreted as a quantifier of quantum correlations beyond entanglement. We investigate our proposed non-Markovianity indicator in two relevant examples. First, we consider the action of a single-party dephasing channel on a maximally entangled two-qubit state, by applying the Jamio\l{}kowski-Choi isomorphism. We observe that the proposed measure is consistent with established non-Markovianity quantifiers defined using other approaches based on dynamical divisibility, distinguishability, and breakdown of monotonicity for the quantum mutual information. Further, we consider the dynamics of two-qubit Werner states, under the action of a local, single-party amplitude damping channel, and observe that the nonmonotonic evolution of the quantum interferometric power is more robust than the corresponding one for entanglement in capturing the backflow of quantum information associated with the non-Markovian process. Implications for the role of non-Markovianity in quantum metrology and possible extensions to continuous variable systems are discussed.
In the study of open quantum systems, information exchange between system and its surrounding environment plays an eminent and important role in analysing the dynamics of open quantum system. In this work, by making use of the quantum information theory and intrinsic properties such as \emph{entropy exchange}, \emph{coherent information} and using the notion of \emph{quantum loss} as a criterion of the amount of lost information, we will propose a new witness, based on information exchange, to detect non-Markovianity. Also a measure for determining the degree of non-Markovianity, will be introduced by using our witness. The characteristic of non-Markovianity is clarified by means of our witness, and we emphasize that this measure is constructed based on the loss of information or in other word the rate of \emph{quantum loss} in the environment. It is defined in term of reducing correlation between system and ancillary. Actually, our focus is on the information which be existed in the environment and it has been entered to the environment due to its interaction with the system. Remarkably, due to choosing the situation which the "system +ancillary" in maximal entangled pure state, optimization procedure does not need in calculation of our measure, such that the degree of non-Markovianity is computed analytically by straightforward calculations.