Entropic witness for quantum memory in open system dynamics

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

The dynamics of open quantum systems are often modeled by non-Markovian processes that account for memory effects arising from interactions with the environment. It is well known that the memory provided by the environment can be classical or quantum in nature. Remarkably, the quantumness of the memory can be witnessed locally by measurements on the open system alone, without requiring access to the environment.
However, existing witnesses are computationally challenging for systems beyond qubits, which severely limits their practical applicability. In this work, we present a tractable criterion for quantum memory based on the von
Neumann entropy, which is easily computable for systems of any dimension. Using this witness, we investigate the nature of memory in a class of physically motivated finite-dimensional qudit dynamics. Moreover, we demonstrate that this criterion is also suitable for detecting quantum memory in continuous-variable systems. As an illustrative example, we analyze non-Markovian Gaussian dynamics of a damped harmonic oscillator.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number033256
Number of pages10
JournalPhysical Review Research
Volume7
Issue number3
Publication statusPublished - 15 Sept 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-1864-4520/work/193177513
ORCID /0000-0002-7806-3525/work/193178446
unpaywall 10.1103/618n-fp8w

Keywords

Keywords

  • open system dynamics, quantum memory, entropic witness, Open quantum systems and decoherence, quantum foundations