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Experimental control of the transition from Markovian to non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems

Nature Physics volume 7, pages 931–934 (2011)Cite this article

Abstract

Realistic quantum mechanical systems are always exposed to an external environment. This often induces Markovian processes in which the system loses information to its surroundings. However, many quantum systems exhibit non-Markovian behaviour with a flow of information from the environment back to the system1,2,3,4,5. The environment usually consists of large number of degrees of freedom which are difficult to control, but some sophisticated schemes for reservoir engineering have been developed6. The control of open systems plays a decisive role, for example, in proposals for entanglement generation7,8,9 and dissipative quantum computation10, for the design of quantum memories11 and in quantum metrology12. Here we report an all-optical experiment which allows one to drive the open system from the Markovian to the non-Markovian regime, to control the information flow between the system and the environment, and to determine the degree of non-Markovianity by measurements on the open system.

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Figure 1: The experimental set-up.
Figure 2: The frequency spectrum of the initial state for various values of the tilt angle θ.
Figure 3: The distance and the concurrence as a function of the effective path difference for four different values of the tilt angle θ.
Figure 4: The change of the trace distance and of the concurrence as functions of the tilt angle θ.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Fundamental Research Program, National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60921091, 10874162 and 10734060), the Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation, and the Graduate School of Modern Optics and Photonics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, CAS, Hefei 230026, China

    Bi-Heng Liu, Li Li, Yun-Feng Huang, Chuan-Feng Li & Guang-Can Guo

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Turku Centre for Quantum Physics, University of Turku, FI-20014 Turun yliopisto, Finland

    Elsi-Mari Laine & Jyrki Piilo

  3. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Freiburg, Hermann-Herder-Strasse 3, D-79104 Freiburg, Germany

    Heinz-Peter Breuer

Authors
  1. Bi-Heng Liu
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  2. Li Li
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  3. Yun-Feng Huang
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Contributions

B-H.L., L.L., Y-F.H., C-F.L. and G-C.G. planned, designed and implemented the experiments. E-M.L., H-P.B. and J.P. carried out the theoretical analysis and developed the interpretation. B-H.L., C-F.L., E-M.L, H-P.B. and J.P. wrote the paper and all authors discussed its contents.

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Correspondence to Chuan-Feng Li or Jyrki Piilo.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Liu, BH., Li, L., Huang, YF. et al. Experimental control of the transition from Markovian to non-Markovian dynamics of open quantum systems. Nature Phys 7, 931–934 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2085

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