Emergence of non-Markovian Decoherent Histories in Integrable Environment: A "Tape Recorder" Model for Local Quantum Observables

Abstract

We propose a new approach to coarse-grained description of quantum evolution that provides an explicit recipe to construct and evaluate multi-time decoherent histories in a controlled way, applicable to non-Markovian and integrable systems. Specifically, we study local interaction quench of a local degree of freedom (an open quantum system) within a noninteracting integrable environment. This setting allows us to identify the environmental degrees of freedom that irreversibly store records of the system's past. These modes emerge sequentially in time and define the projectors required for decoherent histories. We show numerically that the off-diagonal elements of the decoherence functional are exponentially suppressed relative to a significance threshold.