Consider an open quantum system S , interacting with its environment E. Whether the reduced dynamics of the system can be given by a linear map, or not, is an important subject, in the theory of open quantum systems. Dominy, Shabani and Lidar have proposed a general framework for linear Hermitian reduced dynamics. They have considered the case that both the system and the environment are finite dimensional. Their framework can be generalized to include the case that the environment is infinite dimensional too. In this paper, after demonstrating this generalization, we discuss the role of the convexity of the set, of possible initial states of the system-environment, in their framework. Next, we give a proof for the existence of the operator sum representation, for arbitrary linear Hermitian map. This proof enables us to prove the Choi-Jamiołkowski and the Jamiołkowski isomorphisms, straightforwardly.
Consider an open quantum, system interacting with its environment. Whether the reduced dynamics of the system can be given by a linear map or not is an important question in the theory of open quantum systems. Dominy, Shabani and Lidar have proposed a general framework for linear Hermitian reduced dynamics. In addition, it has been shown that their framework is, in fact, the most general one: The reduced dynamics of the system is linear if and only if it can be formulated within the Dominy-Shabani-Lidar framework. This result has been given in a rather abstract way. Here, we want to give another proof for it, in a more illustrative manner.
The dynamics of a closed quantum system, under a unitary time evolution
U, is obviously linear. But, the reduced dynamics of an open quantum system
S, interacting with an environment
E, is not linear, in general. Dominy et al. [Quantum Inf. Process. 15, 465 (2016)] considered the case that the set $\mathcal{S}={{\ensuremath{\rho}}_{SE}}$ of possible initial states of the system-environment is convex, and also possesses another property, which they called
U-consistency. They have shown that, under such circumstances, the reduced dynamics of the system
S is linear. Whether the Dominy-Shabani-Lidar framework is the most general one is the subject of this paper. We assume that the reduced dynamics is linear and show that this leads us to their framework. In other words, the reduced dynamics of the system is linear if and only if it can be formulated within the Dominy-Shabani-Lidar framework.
In the simplest approximation, the reduced dynamics of a quantum system
S interacting with its environment
E is considered to be given by a completely positive map. But, in general, this is not the case. In fact, the reduced dynamics of the system in not even linear, in general. Whether the reduced dynamics is linear or not is determined by two factors: the set of possible initial states of the system-environment $\mathcal{S}=\left\lbrace ρ_{SE} \right\rbrace $, and the joint system-environment unitary evolution
U. When
U is factorisable as
U=US⊗UE, then we can choose
S=D, where
D is the set of all system-environment density operators. In other words, when
U is factorisable, the reduced dynamics of the system
S is linear (in fact unitary) for arbitrary initial state of the system-environment
ρSE. We show that this result cannot be generalized to any non-factorisable
U: For any non-factorisable unitary evolution of the whole system-environment
U, the set
S must be chosen as a proper subset of
D to achieve linear reduced dynamics. As a byproduct, considering a convex set of possible initial states of the system-environment
S such that
TrE S=TrE D, we show that when the reduced dynamics of the system, for one system-environment unitary evolution
U1, is positive, but not completely positive, this implies that reduced dynamics is not linear for another
U2.
Abstract The reduced dynamics of the system S , interacting with the environment E , is not given by a linear map, in general. However, if it is given by a linear map, then this map is also Hermitian. In order that the reduced dynamics of the system is given by a linear Hermitian map, there must be some restrictions on the set of possible initial states of the system-environment or on the possible unitary evolutions of the whole SE . In this paper, adding an ancillary reference space R , we assign to each convex set of possible initial states of the system-environment , for which the reduced dynamics is Hermitian, a tripartite state , which we call the reference state , such that the set is given as the steered states from the reference state . The set of possible initial states of the system is also given as the steered set from a bipartite reference state . The relation between these two reference states is as , where is the identity map on R and is a Hermitian assignment map, from S to SE . As an important consequence of introducing the reference state , we generalize the result of Buscemi (2014 Phys. Rev. Lett . 113 140502): we show that, for a U-consistent subspace, the reduced dynamics of the system is completely positive, for arbitrary unitary evolution of the whole system-environment U , if and only if the reference state is a Markov state. In addition, we show that the evolution of the set of system-environment (system) states is determined by the evolution of the reference state ( ).
We study the influence of the preparation of an open quantum system on its reduced time evolution. In contrast to the frequently considered case of an initial preparation where the total density matrix factorizes into a product of a system density matrix and a bath density matrix the time evolution generally is no longer governed by a linear map nor is this map affine. Put differently, the evolution is truly nonlinear and cannot be cast into the form of a linear map plus a term that is independent of the initial density matrix of the open quantum system. As a consequence, the inhomogeneity that emerges in formally exact generalized master equations is in fact a nonlinear term that vanishes for a factorizing initial state. The general results are elucidated with the example of two interacting spins prepared at thermal equilibrium with one spin subjected to an external field. The second spin represents the environment. The field allows the preparation of mixed density matrices of the first spin that can be represented as a convex combination of two limiting pure states, i.e., the preparable reduced density matrices make up a convex set. Moreover, the map from these reduced density matrices onto the corresponding density matrices of the total system is affine only for vanishing coupling between the spins. In general, the set of the accessible total density matrices is nonconvex.
We show that quantum subdynamics of an open quantum system can always be described by a linear, Hermitian map irrespective of the form of the initial total system state. Since the theory of quantum error correction was developed based on the assumption of completely positive (CP) maps, we present a generalized theory of linear quantum error correction, which applies to any linear map describing the open system evolution. In the physically relevant setting of Hermitian maps, we show that the CP-map-based version of quantum error correction theory applies without modifications. However, we show that a more general scenario is also possible, where the recovery map is Hermitian but not CP. Since non-CP maps have nonpositive matrices in their range, we provide a geometric characterization of the positivity domain of general linear maps. In particular, we show that this domain is convex and that this implies a simple algorithm for finding its boundary.