Witness for initial correlations among environments

Abstract

A quantum system inevitably interacts with its surroundings. In general, one does not have detailed information on an environment. Identifying the environmental features can help us to control the environment and its effects on the dynamics of an open system. Here, we consider a tripartite system and introduce a witness for the initial correlations among environments by means of the concept of the trace distance. Due to the existence of the initial environmental correlations, a tight upper bound is obtained for the growth of the trace distance of open quantum system states. Therefore, the initial correlations among the environments subject to particular conditions can be detected by measurements on the open system.