Locality and universality of quantum memory effects.

The modeling and analysis of the dynamics of complex systems often requires to employ non-Markovian stochastic processes. While there is a clear and well-established mathematical definition for non-Markovianity in the case of classical systems, the extension to the quantum regime recently caused a vivid debate, leading to many different proposals for the characterization and quantification of memory effects in the dynamics of open quantum systems. Here, we derive a mathematical representation for the non-Markovianity measure based on the exchange of information between the open system and its environment, which reveals the locality and universality of non-Markovianity in the quantum state space and substantially simplifies its numerical and experimental determination. We further illustrate the application of this representation by means of an all-optical experiment which allows the measurement of the degree of memory effects in a photonic quantum process with high accuracy.

Sudden transition between classical and quantum decoherence.

We study the dynamics of quantum and classical correlations in the presence of nondissipative decoherence. We discover a class of initial states for which the quantum correlations, quantified by the quantum discord, are not destroyed by decoherence for times t<[symbol: see text]. In this initial time interval classical correlations decay. For t>[symbol: see text], on the other hand, classical correlations do not change in time and only quantum correlations are lost due to the interaction with the environment. Therefore, at the transition time [symbol: see text] the open system dynamics exhibits a sudden transition from classical to quantum decoherence regime.

Scaling of non-Markovian Monte Carlo wave-function methods.

We demonstrate a scaling method for non-Markovian Monte Carlo wave-function simulations used to study open quantum systems weakly coupled to their environments. We derive a scaling equation, from which the result for the expectation values of arbitrary operators of interest can be calculated, all the quantities in the equation being easily obtainable from the scaled Monte Carlo wave-function simulations. In the optimal case, the scaling method can be used, within the weak coupling approximation, to reduce the size of the generated Monte Carlo ensemble by several orders of magnitude. Thus, the developed method allows faster simulations and makes it possible to solve the dynamics of the certain class of non-Markovian systems whose simulation would be otherwise too tedious because of the requirement for large computational resources.