Assessing non-Markovian dynamics through moments of the Choi state

Abstract

Non-Markovian effects in open quantum system dynamics usually manifest backflow of information from the environment to the system, indicating complete-positive divisibility breaking of the dynamics. We provide a criterion for witnessing such non-Markovian dynamics exhibiting information backflow, based on the moments of Choi-matrices. The moment condition determined by the positive semi-definiteness of a matrix, does not hold for a Choi-state describing non-Markovian dynamics. We then present some explicit examples in support of our proposed non-Markovianity detection scheme. Finally, a moment based measure of non-Markovianity for unital dynamics is formulated.