Inequivalence of Correlation-based Measures of Non-Markovianity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that entanglement- and mutual information-based measures of quantum non-Markovianity are fundamentally different, providing analytical solutions and an example where they disagree, highlighting the nuanced nature of quantum memory effects.

Contribution

It analytically solves the optimization in the entanglement-based measure and presents an explicit example showing the inequivalence of the two measures.

Findings

Optimal initial states are Bell states for entanglement measure

Mutual information can detect memory effects missed by entanglement measure

Disagreement explained through information accessibility analysis

Abstract

We conclusively show that the entanglement- and the mutual information-based measures of quantum non-Markovianity are inequivalent. To this aim, we first analytically solve the optimization problem in the definition of the entanglement-based measure for a two-level system. We demonstrate that the optimal initial bipartite state of the open system and the ancillary is always given by one of the Bell states for any one qubit dynamics. On top of this result, we present an explicit example dynamics where memory effects emerge according to the mutual information-based measure, even though the time evolution remains memoryless with respect to the entanglement-based measure. Finally, we explain this disagreement between the two measures in terms of the information dynamics of the open system, exploring the accessible and inaccessible parts of information.