The transient dynamics of quantum coherence of Gaussian states are investigated. The state is coupled to an external environment which can be described by a Fano-Anderson type Hamiltonian. Solving the quantum Langevin equation, we obtain the Greens functions which are used to compute the time evolved first and second moments of the quadrature operators. From the quadrature operator moments, we construct the covariance matrix which is used to measure the coherence in the system. The coherence is measured using the relative entropy of coherence measure. We consider three different classes of spectral densities in our analysis viz, the Ohmic, the sub-Ohmic, and the super-Ohmic densities. In our work, we study the dynamics of the coherent state, squeezed state, and displaced squeezed state. For all these states we observe that when the coupling with the system and the environment is weak, the coherence monotonically decreases and eventually vanishes in a long time. Thus all the states exhibit Markovian evolution in the weak coupling limit. In the strong coupling limit, the dynamics for the initial period is Markovian and after a certain period, it becomes non-Markovian where we observe an environmental backaction on the system. Thus in the strong coupling limit, we observe a dynamical crossover from Markovian nature to non-Markovian behavior. This crossover is very abrupt under some environmental conditions and for some parameters of the quantum state. Using a quantum master equation approach we verify the crossover from the dynamics of the dissipation and fluctuation parameters and the results endorse those obtained from coherence dynamics.
Non-Markovian evolution of an open quantum system can be induced by the memory effects of a reservoir. Although a reservoir with stronger memory effects may seem like it should cause stronger non-Markovian effects on the system of interest, this seemingly intuitive thinking may not always be correct. We illustrate this by investigating a qubit (a two-level atom) that is coupled to a hierarchical environment, which contains a single-mode cavity and a reservoir consisting of infinite numbers of modes. We show how the non-Markovian character of the system is influenced by the coupling strength be…
We study the entanglement dynamics of two non-interacting, spatially separated qubits subject to local environment noises. Based on exactly solvable models for non-Markovian amplitude damping and phase damping noises, we are able to analyze the entanglement dynamics of the two qubits for different coupling bandwidths and different detunings. We show that entanglement oscillations can occur for both amplitude and phase damping noises. Moreover, we demonstrate that changing the coupling bandwidth can lead to crossover between dissipative and non-dissipative entanglement dynamics, while varying t…
The large deviation theory has recently been applied to open quantum systems to uncover dynamical crossovers in the space of quantum trajectories associated to Markovian evolutions. Such dynamical crossovers are characterized by qualitative changes in the fluctuations of rare quantum jump trajectories, and have been observed in the statistics of coherently driven quantum systems. In this article we investigate the counting statistics of rare quantum trajectories of an undriven system undergoing a pure relaxation process, namely, Markovian exciton transport. We find that dynamical crossovers oc…
We provide an analysis on non-Markovian quantum evolution based on the spectral properties of dynamical maps. We introduce the dynamical analog of entanglement witness to detect non-Markovianity and we illustrate its behaviour with several instructive examples. It is shown that for a certain class of dynamical maps the shape of the body of accessible states provides a simple non-Markovianity witness.
The exploitation and characterization of memory effects arising from the interaction between system and environment is a key prerequisite for quantum reservoir engineering beyond the standard Markovian limit. In this paper we investigate a prototype of non-Markovian dynamics experimentally implementable with superconducting qubits. We rigorously quantify non-Markovianity highlighting the effects of the environmental temperature on the Markovian to non-Markovian crossover. We investigate how memory effects influence, and specifically suppress, the ability to perform work on the driven qubit. We…
We are interested in dynamics of a system in an environment, or an open system. Such phenomena like {\it crossover} from Markovian to non-Markovian relaxation and {\it thermal equilibration} are of our interest. Open systems have experimentally been studied with ultra cold atoms, ions in traps, optics, and cold electric circuits because well isolated systems can be prepared here and thus the effects of environments can be controlled. We point out that some molecules solved in isotropic liquid are well isolated and thus they can also be employed for studying open systems in Nuclear Magnetic Res…
A dynamical treatment of Markovian diffusion is presented and several applications discussed. The stochastic interpretation of quantum mechanics is considered within this framework. A model for Brownian movement which includes second order quantum effects is derived.
Markovianity of the quantum open system processes is a topic of the considerable current interest. Typically, invertibility is assumed to be non-essential for Markovianity of the open-quantum-system dynamical maps. Nevertheless, in this paper we distinguish a class of physically important dynamical maps (processes) for which invertibility is a necessary condition for Markovianity. Since every quantum-state tomography directly provides information on invertibility of the map, no optimization procedure is necessary for determining non-Markovianity regarding the considered class of dynamical proc…
Identifying non-Markovianity with non-divisibility, we propose a measure for non-Markovinity of quantum process. Three examples are presented to illustrate the non-Markovianity, measure for non-Markovianity is calculated and discussed. Comparison with other measures of non-Markovianity is made. Our non-Markovianity measure has the merit that no optimization procedure is required and it is finite for any quantum process, which greatly enhances the practical relevance of the proposed measure.
We investigate the relationship between non-Markovianity and the effectiveness of a dynamical decoupling protocol for qubits undergoing pure dephasing. We consider an exact model in which dephasing arises due to a bosonic environment with a spectral density of the Ohmic class. This is parametrised by an Ohmicity parameter by changing which we can model both Markovian and non-Markovian environments. Interestingly, we find that engineering a non-Markovian environment is detrimental to the efficiency of the dynamical decoupling scheme, leading to a worse coherence preservation. We show that each …
In this paper we present a detailed critical study of several recently proposed non-Markovianity measures. We analyse their properties for single qubit and two-qubit systems in both pure-dephasing and dissipative scenarios. More specifically we investigate and compare their computability, their physical meaning, their Markovian to non-Markovian crossover, and their additivity properties with respect to the number of qubits. The bottom-up approach that we pursue is aimed at identifying similarities and differences in the behavior of non-Markovianity indicators in several paradigmatic open syste…
In this work we develop a numerical framework to investigate the renormalization of the non-Markovian dynamics of an open quantum system to which dynamical decoupling is applied. We utilize a non-Markovian master equation which is derived from the non-Markovian quantum trajectories formalism. It contains incoherent Markovian dynamics and coherent Schrödinger dynamics as its limiting cases and is capable of capture the transition between them. We have performed comprehensive simulations for the cases in which the system is either driven by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise or or is described by the …
We investigate the dynamical information exchange between a two-state system and its environment which is measured by von Neumann entropy. It is found that in the underdamping regime, the entropy dynamics exhibits an extremely non-Markovian oscillation-hump feature, in which oscillations manifest quantum coherence and a hump of envelop demonstrates temporal memory of bath. It indicates that the process of entropy exchange is bidirectional. When the coupling strength increases a certain threshold, the hump along with ripple disappears, which is indicative of the coherent-incoherent dynamical cr…
Decoherence-free subspaces (DFSs) provide a strategy for protecting the dynamics of an open system from decoherence induced by the system-environment interaction. So far, DFSs have been primarily studied in the framework of Markovian master equations. In this work, we study decoherence-free (DF) states in the general setting of a non-Markovian fermionic environment. We identify the DF states by diagonalizing the non-unitary evolution operator for a two-level fermionic system attached to an electron reservoir. By solving the exact master equation, we show that DF states can be stabilized dynami…
The system-environment interaction is simulated by light propagating in coupled photonic waveguides. The profile of the electromagnetic field provides intuitive physical insight to study the Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems. The transition from non-Markovian to Markovian process is demonstrated by increasing the size of environment, as the energy evolution changes from oscillating to an exponential decay, and the revival period increases. Moreover, the dynamical decoupling with a sequence of phase modulations is introduced to such a photonic open system to form a ba…
We introduce a method to construct non-Markovian variants of completely positive (CP) dynamical maps, particularly, qubit Pauli channels. We identify non-Markovianity with the breakdown in CP-divisibility of the map, i.e., appearance of a not-completely-positive (NCP) intermediate map. In particular, we consider the case of non-Markovian dephasing in detail. The eigenvalues of the Choi matrix of the intermediate map crossover at a point which corresponds to a singularity in the canonical decoherence rate of the corresponding master equation, and thus to a momentary non-invertibility of the map…
We analyse the role played by system-environment correlations in the emergence of non-Markovian dynamics. By working within the framework developed in Breuer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 210401 (2009), we unveil a fundamental connection between non-Markovian behaviour and dynamics of system-environment correlations. We derive an upper bound to the rate of change of the distinguishability between different states of the system that explicitly depends on the development and establishment of correlations between system and environment. We illustrate our results using a fully solvable spin-chain …
We find dynamical invariants for open quantum systems described by the non-Markovian quantum state diffusion (QSD) equation. In stark contrast to closed systems where the dynamical invariant can be identical to the system density operator, these dynamical invariants no longer share the equation of motion for the density operator. Moreover, the invariants obtained with from bi-orthonormal basis can be used to render an exact solution to the QSD equation and the corresponding non-Markovian dynamics without using master equations or numerical simulations. Significantly we show that we can apply t…
We consider the effect of broadband decoherence on the performance of refocusing sequences, having in mind applications of dynamical decoupling in concatenation with quantum error correcting codes as the first stage of coherence protection. Specifically, we construct cumulant expansions of effective decoherence operators for a qubit driven by a pulse of a generic symmetric shape, and for several sequences of $π$- and $π/2$-pulses. While, in general, the performance of soft pulses in decoupling sequences in the presence of Markovian decoherence is worse than that of the ideal $δ$-pulses, it can…
We identify a set of dynamical maps of open quantum system, and refer to them as "$ ε$-Markovian" maps. It is constituted of maps which, in a higher dimensional system-environment Hilbert space, possibly violate Born approximation but only a "little". We characterize the "$ε$-nonmarkovianity" of a general dynamical map by the minimum distance of that map from the set of $ε$-Markovian maps. We analytically derive an inequality which gives a bound on the $ ε$-nonmarkovianity of the dynamical map, in terms of an entanglement-like resource generated between the system and its "immediate" environme…
It is known that the time evolution of a subsystem from an initial state to two later times, t1, t2 (t2 > t1), are both completely positive (CP) but it is shown here that in the intermediate times between t1 and t2, in general, it need not be CP. This reveals the key to the Markov (if CP) and nonMarkov (if NCP) avataras of the intermediate dynamics. This is brought out based on A and B dynamical maps - without resorting to Master equation approach. The choice of tensor product form for the global initial state points towards the system-environment interaction dynamics as the sole cause for Mar…
One of the most important topics in the study of the dynamics of open quantum system is information exchange between system and environment. Based on the features of a back-flow information from an environment to a system, an approach is provided to detect non-Markovianity for unital dynamical maps. The method takes advantage of non-contractive property of the von Neumann entropy under completely positive and trace preserving unital maps. Accordingly, for the dynamics of a single qubit as an open quantum system, the sign of the time-derivative of the density matrix eigenvalues of the system de…
We construct a non-Markovian canonical dynamical map that accounts for systems correlated with the environment. The physical meaning of not completely positive maps is studied to obtain a theory of non-Markovian quantum dynamics. The relationship between inverse maps and correlations with the environment is established. A generalized non-Markovian master equation is derived from the canonical dynamical map that goes beyond the Kossakowski-Lindblad Markovian master equation. Non-equilibrium quantum thermodynamics can be be studied within this theory.
We theoretically study the dynamical dephasing of a quantum two level system interacting with an environment exhibiting non-Markovian random telegraph fluctuations. The time evolution of the conditional probability of the environmental noise is governed by a generalized master equation depending on the environmental memory effect. The expression of the dephasing factor is derived exactly which is closely associated with the memory kernel in the generalized master equation for the conditional probability of the environmental noise. In terms of three important types memory kernels, we discuss th…
Quantum dynamical maps provide suitable mathematical representation of quantum evolutions. It is the very notion of complete positivity which provides a proper mathematical representation of quantum evolution and gives rise to the powerful generalization of unitary evolution of closed Hamiltonian systems. A prominent example of quantum evolution of an open system is a Markovian semigroup. In what follows, we analyze both the semigroups of positive and completely positive maps. In the latter case the dynamics is governed by the celebrated Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) Master Equa…
We address the dynamics of continuous-time quantum walks on one-dimensional disordered lattices inducing dynamical noise in the system. Noise is described as time-dependent fluctuations of the tunneling amplitudes between adjacent sites, and attention is focused on non-Gaussian telegraph noise, going beyond the usual assumption of fast Gaussian noise. We observe the emergence of two different dynamical behaviors for the walker, corresponding to two opposite noise regimes: slow noise (i.e. strong coupling with the environment) confines the walker into few lattice nodes, while fast noise (weak c…
We study the entanglement dynamics for two independent superconducting qubits each affected by a bistable impurity generating random telegraph noise (RTN) at pure dephasing. The relevant parameter is the ratio $g$ between qubit-RTN coupling strength and RTN switching rate, that captures the physics of the crossover between Markovian and non-Markovian features of the dynamics. For identical qubit-RTN subsystems, a threshold value $g_\mathrm{th}$ of the crossover parameter separates exponential decay and onset of revivals; different qualitative behaviors also show up by changing the initial cond…
We obtain the analytical expression for the Kraus decomposition of the quantum map of an environment modeled by an arbitrary quadratic fermionic Hamiltonian acting on one or two qubits, and derive simple functions to check the non-positivity of the intermediate map. These functions correspond to two different sufficient criteria for non-Markovianity. In the particular case of an environment represented by the Ising Hamiltonian, we discuss the two sources of non-Markovianity in the model, one due to the finite size of the lattice, and another due to the kind of interactions.
It is known that the dynamical evolution of a system, from an initial tensor product state of system and environment, to any two later times, t1,t2 (t2>t1), are both completely positive (CP) but in the intermediate times between t1 and t2 it need not be CP. This reveals the key to the Markov (if CP) and nonMarkov (if it is not CP) avataras of the intermediate dynamics. This is brought out here in terms of the quantum stochastic map A and the associated dynamical map B -- without resorting to master equation approaches. We investigate these features with four examples which have entirely differ…
We address the dynamics of quantum correlations in continuous variable open systems and analyze the evolution of bipartite Gaussian states in independent noisy channels. In particular, upon introducing the notion of dynamical path through a suitable parametrization for symmetric states, we focus attention on phenomena that are common to Markovian and non-Markovian Gaussian maps under the assumptions of weak coupling and secular approximation. We found that the dynamical paths in the parameter space are universal, that is they do depend only on the initial state and on the effective temperature…
A dynamical decoupling scheme for the deterrence of errors in the non-Markovian (usually corresponding to low temperature, short time, and strong coupling) regimes suitable for qubits constructed out of a multilevel structure is studied. We use the effective spin-boson model (ESBM) introduced recently [K. Shiokawa and B. L. Hu, Phys. Rev. A70, 062106 (2004)] as a low temperature limit of the quantum Brownian oscillator model, where one can obtain exact solutions for a general environment with colored noises. In our decoupling scheme a train of pairs of strong pulses are used to evolve the inte…
Convex combinations of the completely positive (CP) as well as CP-divisible, continuous time dynamical maps arising from collision models are investigated. While the individual maps are both CP and Markovian we find that convex combinations remain CP but not necessarily Markovian. Examples of such combinations for qubit dynamical maps arising from collisional models are worked out and the invertibility, CP-divisibility, P-divisibility as well as Markovian properties of such maps are explored.
It is shown that the fidelity of the dynamically evolved system with its earlier time density matrix provides a signature of non-Markovian dynamics. Also, the fidelity associated with the initial state and the dynamically evolved state is shown to be larger in the non-Markovian evolution compared to that in the corresponding Markovian case. Starting from the Kraus representation of quantum evolution, the Markovian and non-Markovian features are discerned in its short time structure. These two features are in concordance with each other and they are illustrated with the help of four models of i…
Quantum non-Markovianity of channels can be produced by mixing Markovian channels, as observed recently by various authors. We consider an analogous question of whether singularities of the channel can be produced by mixing non-singular channels, i.e., ones that lack them. Here we answer the question in the negative in the context of qubit Pauli channels. On the other hand, mixing channels with a singularity can lead to the elimination of singularities in the resultant channel. We distinguish between two types of singular channels, which lead under mixing to broadly quite different properties …
In this paper, we use the quantum state diffusion (QSD) equation to implement the Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) to a three-level quantum system coupled to a non-Markovian reservoir comprising of infinite numbers of degrees of freedom. For this purpose, we first reformulate the non-Markovian QSD to incorporate the effect of the external control fields. With this stochastic QSD approach, we demonstrate that an unknown state of the three-level quantum system can be universally protected against both colored phase and amplitude noises when the control-pulse sequences and control operators are p…
We introduce a non-Markovianity measure for continuous variable open quantum systems based on the idea put forward in H.-P. Breuer et al., Phys. Rev. Lett.\textbf{103}, 210401 (2009), i.e., by quantifying the flow of information from the environment back to the open system. Instead of the trace distance we use here the fidelity to assess distinguishability of quantum states. We employ our measure to evaluate non-Markovianity of two paradigmatic Gaussian channels: the purely damping channel and the quantum Brownian motion channel with Ohmic environment. We consider different classes of Gaussian…
The impossibility of an indeterministic evolution for standard relativistic quantum field theories, that is, theories in which all fields satisfy the condition that the generators of spacetime translation have spectrum in the forward light-cone, is demonstrated. The demonstration proceeds by arguing that a relativistically invariant theory must have a stable vacuum, and then showing that stability of the vacuum, together with the requirements imposed by relativistic causality, entails deterministic evolution, if all degrees of freedom are standard degrees of freedom.
We introduce a generalized approach to characterize the non-Markovianity of quantum dynamical maps via breakdown of monotonicity of thermodynamic functions. By adopting an entropy-based formulation of quantum thermodynamics, we use the relationship between heat and entropy to propose a measure of non-Markovianity based on the heat flow for single-qubit quantum evolutions. This measure can be applied for unital dynamical maps that do not invert the sign of the internal energy. Under certain conditions, it can also be extended for other thermodynamic functions, such as internal energy and work f…
The uncertainty relation is a fundamental limit in quantum mechanics and is of great importance to quantum information processing as it relates to quantum precision measurement. Due to interactions with the surrounding environment, a quantum system will unavoidably suffer from decoherence. Here, we investigate the dynamic behaviors of the entropic uncertainty relation of an atom-cavity interacting system under a bosonic reservoir during the crossover between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Specifically, we explore the dynamic behavior of the entropic uncertainty relation for a pair of inc…
Recently we pointed out the so-called Local Time Scheme as a novel approach to quantum foundations that solves the preferred pointer-basis problem. In this paper we introduce and analyze in depth a rather non-standard dynamical map that is imposed by the scheme. On one hand, the map does not allow for introducing a properly defined generator of the evolution nor does it represent a quantum channel. On the other hand, the map is linear, positive, trace preserving and unital as well as completely positive, but is not divisible and therefore non-Markovian. Nevertheless, we provide quantitative cr…
In the weak-coupling limit approach to open quantum systems, the presence of the bath is eliminated and accounted for by a master equation that introduces dissipative contributions to the system reduced dynamics. Within this framework, there are no bath entropy contributions to the entropy balance. We show that, as a consequence, the entropy production fails to be positive for a class of physically legitimate (i.e., completely positive and trace preserving) non-Markovian dynamical maps. Moreover, in the absence of the semigroup property, if the reduced dynamics has a thermal asymptotic state, …
We construct a dynamical map which is not positive divisible and does not present information backflow either (as measured by trace norm quantifiers). It is formulated for a qutrit system undergoing noninvertible dynamics. This provides an evidence that the two definitions of quantum Markovianity based on absence of information backflow and positive divisibility are nonequivalent for general noninvertible dynamical maps
We provide further characterization of non-Markovian quantum dynamics based on the concept of divisible dynamical maps. In analogy to entanglement witness we propose a non-Markovianity witness and introduce the corresponding measure of non-Markovianity. We also provide characterization of non-Markovianity in terms of entropic quantities, fidelity and Wigner-Yanase-Dyson skew information.
The Markovian dynamics of a qubit is investigated in the scheme of random unitary dynamics, where Kraus operators are changed by an extra noise. The behavior of Markovianity is explored in the perturbed scenario. We provide a new algorithm for checking CP-divisibility (Markovianity) of a dynamical map.
We analyze the dynamics of quantum beats in a system of two V-type three-level atoms coupled to a waveguide. We show that quantum beats can be collectively enhanced or suppressed, akin to Dicke super- and sub-radiance, depending on the interatomic separation and the initial correlations between the atoms. In particular, the interference properties of the collective beats are determined by the distance between the atoms modulo the beat wavelength. We study the collective atomic and field dynamics, illustrating a crossover from a Markovian to a non-Markovian regime as the atomic separation becom…
