No Arabic abstract
Non-Markovian effects arising in open quantum systems evolution have been a subject of increasing interest over the past decade. One of the most appealing features of non-Markovianity (NM) is that it captures scenarios where loss of information and coherence are reversible, and thus a temporary backflow of information from the environment to the system is possible. In this work we study the interplay between the degree of non-Markovianity and the action of time-dependent control fields in an open two-level quantum system. We find that periodical modulation of a field acting solely on the system can greatly enhance the degree of non-Markovianity with respect to the undriven case. We show that this effect is present only when the coupling between system and environment is weak. Remarkably, the enhancement disappears at strong coupling, which is usually the regime where non-Markovian effects are expected to be more pronounced.
We show that non-Markovian open quantum systems can exhibit exact Markovian dynamics up to an arbitrarily long time; the non-Markovianity of such systems is thus perfectly hidden, i.e. not experimentally detectable by looking at the reduced dynamics alone. This shows that non-Markovianity is physically undecidable and extremely counterintuitive, since its features can change at any time, without precursors. Some interesting examples are discussed.
Detuned systems can spontaneously achieve a synchronous dynamics and display robust quantum correlations in different local and global dissipation regimes. Beyond the Markovian limit, information backflow from the environment becomes a crucial mechanism whose interplay with spontaneous synchronization is unknown. Considering a model of two coupled qubits, one of which interacts with a dissipative environment, we show that non-Markovianity is highly detrimental for the emergence of synchronization, for the latter can be delayed and hindered because of the presence of information backflow. The results are obtained considering both a master equation approach and a collision model based on repeated interactions, which represents a very versatile tool to tailor the desired kind of environment.
Non-Markovianity, as an important feature of general open quantum systems, is usually difficult to quantify with limited knowledge of how the plant that we are interested in interacts with its environment-the bath. It often happens that the reduced dynamics of the plant attached to a non-Markovian bath becomes indistinguishable from the one with a Markovian bath, if we left the entire system freely evolve. Here we show that non-Markovianity can be revealed via applying local unitary operations on the plant-they will influence the plant evolution at later times due to memory of the bath. This not only provides a new criterion for non-Markovianity, but also sheds light on protecting and recovering quantum coherence in non-Markovian systems, which will be useful for quantum-information processing.
We investigate the effect of counter-rotating-wave terms on the non-Markovianity in quantum open systems by employing the hierarchical equations of motion in the framework of the non-Markovian quantum state diffusion approach. As illustrative examples, the non-Markovian memory effect of a qubit embedded in a bosonic and a fermionic environment at zero temperature are analyzed. It is found that the counter-rotating-wave terms are able to enhance the observed non-Markovianity no matter the environment is composed of bosons or fermions. This result suggests that the rotating-wave approximation may inevitably reduce the non-Markovianity in quantum open systems. Moreover, we find that the modification of the non-Markovianity due to the different statistical properties of environmental modes becomes larger with the increase of the system-environment coupling strength.
Non-Markovian reduced dynamics of an open system is investigated. In the case the initial state of the reservoir is the vacuum state, an approximation is introduced which makes possible to construct a reduced dynamics which is completely positive.