Redfield reduced dynamics and entanglement

Abstract

In phenomenological applications the time evolution of subsystems immersed in an external environment are sometimes described by Markovian semigroups of Redfield type that result non-positive: the appearence of negative probabilities is avoided by restricting the admissible initial conditions to those states that remain positive under the action of the dynamics. We show that this often adopted procedure may lead to physical inconsistencies in presence of entanglement.