Experimental control of the transition from Markovian to non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental method to control and measure the transition between Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics in open quantum systems by preparing initial environmental states, impacting quantum information flow.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach to selectively control the environment, enabling the transition from Markovian to non-Markovian behavior in quantum systems.

Findings

Controlled transition between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes

Direct measurement of non-Markovianity in the system

Environmental state preparation influences information flow

Abstract

Realistic quantum mechanical systems are always exposed to an external environment. The presence of the environment often gives rise to a Markovian process in which the system loses information to its surroundings. However, many quantum systems exhibit a pronounced non-Markovian behavior in which there is a flow of information from the environment back to the system, signifying the presence of quantum memory effects [1-5]. The environment is usually composed of a large number of degrees of freedom which are difficult to control, but some sophisticated schemes for modifying the environment have been developed [6]. The physical realization and control of dynamical processes in open quantum systems plays a decisive role, for example, in recent proposals for the generation of entangled states [7-9], for schemes of dissipative quantum computation [10], for the design of quantum memories [11] and for the enhancement of the efficiency in quantum metrology [12]. Here we report an experiment which allows through selective preparation of the initial environmental states to drive the open system from the Markovian to the non-Markovian regime, to control the information flow between the system and the environment, and to determine the degree of non-Markovianity by direct measurements on the open system.