Entropic witness for quantum memory in open system dynamics

Abstract

The dynamics of open quantum system 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. 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.