Maximally non-Markovian quantum dynamics without environment backflow of information

Abstract

The degree of non-Markovianity allows to characterizing quantum evolutions that depart from a Markovian regime in a similar way as Schmidt number measures the degree of entanglement of pure states. Maximally non-Markovian dynamics are the analogous of maximally entangled states [D. Chruściński and S. Maniscalco, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 120404 (2014)]. Here, we demonstrate that there exists a class of maximally non-Markovian quantum evolutions where the associated environment (degrees of freedom not belonging to the system) obeys a Markovian (memoryless) dynamics, which in turn is unperturbed by the system state or dynamics. These properties imply the absence of any "physical environment-to-system backflow of information." Non-Markovian features (as usual in quantum systems coupled to dissipative classical degrees of freedom) arise from a unidirectional dependence of the system dynamics on the reservoir states.

10 pages, 4 figures