Delineating incoherent non-Markovian dynamics using quantum coherence

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel method to characterize non-Markovian quantum dynamics by analyzing the non-monotonic behavior of quantum coherence, providing a new measure that captures information back-flow in system-environment interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a coherence-based non-Markovianity measure that detects environmental back-flow and is compatible with existing distinguishability criteria.

Findings

The measure detects non-Markovian behavior in dephasing and dissipative dynamics.

It captures the back-flow of information from environment to system.

The measure aligns with established non-Markovianity criteria.

Abstract

We introduce a method of characterization of non-Markovianity using coherence of a system interacting with the environment. We show that under the allowed incoherent operations, monotonicity of a valid coherence measure is affected due to non-Markovian features of the system-environment evolution. We also define a measure to quantify non-Markovianity of the underlying dynamics based on the non-monotonic behavior of the coherence measure. We investigate our proposed non-Markovianity marker in the behavior of dephasing and dissipative dynamics for one and two qubit cases. We also show that our proposed measure captures the back-flow of information from the environment to the system and compatible with well known distinguishability criteria of non-Markovianity.