The quantum channels with memory, known as non-Markovian channels, are of crucial importance for a realistic description of a variety of physical systems, and pave ways for new methods of decoherence control by manipulating the properties of an environment such as its frequency spectrum. In this work, the reduced dynamics of a coin in a discrete-time quantum walk is characterized as a non-Markovian quantum channel. A general formalism is sketched to extract the Kraus operators for a
t-step quantum walk. Non-Markovianity, in the sense of P indivisibility of the reduced coin dynamics, is inferred from the nonmonotonous behavior of distinguishability of two orthogonal states subjected to it. Furthermore, we study various quantum information-theoretic quantities of a qubit under the action of this channel, putting in perspective the role such channels can play in various quantum information processing tasks.
Quantum non-Markovianity of a quantum noisy channel is typically identified with information backflow or, more generally, with departure of the intermediate map from complete positivity. But here, we also indicate certain non-Markovian channels that cannot be witnessed by the CP-divisibility criterion. In complex systems, non-Markovianity becomes more involved on account of subsystem dynamics. Here we study various facets of non-Markovian evolution, in the context of coined quantum walks, with particular stress on disambiguating the internal vs. environmental contributions to non-Markovian backflow. For the above problem of disambiguation, we present a general power-spectral technique based on a distinguishability measure such as trace-distance or correlation measure such as mutual information. We also study various facets of quantum correlations in the transition from quantum to classical random walks, under the considered non-Markovian noise models. The potential for the application of this analysis to the quantum statistical dynamics of complex systems is indicated.