Quantum non-Markovian processes break conditional past-future independence

Abstract

For classical Markovian stochastic systems, past and future events become statistically independent when conditioned to a given state at the present time. Memory non-Markovian effects break this condition, inducing a non-vanishing conditional past-future correlation. Here, this classical memory indicator is extended to a quantum regime, which provides an operational definition of quantum non-Markovianity based on a minimal set of three time-ordered quantum system measurements and post-selection. The detection of memory effects through the measurement scheme is univocally related to departures from Born-Markov and white noise approximations in quantum and classical environments respectively.