Engineering, controlling, and simulating quantum dynamics is a strenuous task. However, these techniques are crucial to develop quantum technologies, preserve quantum properties, and engineer decoherence. Earlier results have demonstrated reservoir engineering, construction of a quantum simulator for Markovian open systems, and controlled transition from Markovian to non-Markovian regime. Dephasing is an ubiquitous mechanism to degrade the performance of quantum computers. However, all-purpose quantum simulator for generic dephasing is still missing. Here, we demonstrate full experimental control of dephasing allowing us to implement arbitrary decoherence dynamics of a qubit. As examples, we use a photon to simulate the dynamics of a qubit coupled to an Ising chain in a transverse field and also demonstrate a simulation of nonpositive dynamical map. Our platform opens the possibility to simulate dephasing of any physical system and study fundamental questions on open quantum systems.

We study and compare the sensitivity of multiple non-Markovianity indicators for a qubit subjected to general phase-covariant noise. For each of the indicators, we derive analytical conditions to detect the dynamics as non-Markovian. We present these conditions as relations between the time-dependent decay rates for the general open system dynamics and its commutative and unital subclasses. These relations tell directly if the dynamics is non-Markovian w.r.t.each indicator, without the need to explicitly derive and specify the analytic form of the time-dependent coefficients. Moreover, with a shift in perspective, we show that if one assumes only the general form of the master equation, measuring the non-Markovianity indicators gives us directly non-trivial information on the relations between the unknown decay rates.

The quantum speed limit (QSL) sets a bound on the minimum time required for a quantum system to evolve between two states. For open quantum systems this quantity depends on the dynamical map describing the time evolution in presence of the environment, on the evolution time τ, and on the initial state of the system. We consider a general single qubit open dynamics and show that there is no simple relationship between memory effects and the tightness of the QSL bound. We prove that only for specific classes of dynamical evolutions and initial states, there exists a link between non-Markovianity and the QSL. Our results shed light on the connection between information back-flow between system and environment and the speed of quantum evolution. than 1 when it is non-Markovian. Their result suggests that in the Markovian case the dynamics saturates the bound, giving the most efficient evolution, whereas in the non-Markovian case the actual limit can still be lower than the evolution time. The explicitly derived dependency between QSL and non-Markovianity has proven useful in several applications [10,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28].Our main goal is to tackle the question of the connection between non-Markovianity and the QSL not starting from a specific model but in full generality, looking in detail at the role played by the dynamical map, the evolution time τ, and the initial state, in the achievement of the QSL bound. We show that, for the most general cases, there is no simple connection between the Markovian to non-Markovian crossover and the QSL. Under certain more restrictive assumptions, however, we can characterize families of one-qubit dynamical maps for which the QSL speed-up coincides with the onset of non-Markovianity, as indicated by the Breuer-Laine-Piilo (BLP) non-Markovianity measure [13]. For these families we derive analytical formulas for the QSL as a function of the BLP measure. Our results also show that, for a given open quantum system model, both the evolution time τ and the initial state play a key role and cannot be overlooked when making claims on the QSL. As an example, we generalize results in [4] to a broader set of pure initial states, and show that the QSL bound is saturated only for very few initial states even in the fully Markovian case.The paper is structured as follows. In section 2 we briefly present the formalism of open quantum systems and recall the common mathematical definitions of QSL. In section 3 we present the Jaynes-Cummings (JC) model used in [4] and discuss briefly their results concerning non-Markovianity and quantum speed-up. In section 4 we study how the actual evolution time affects the QSL for the same JC system. In section 5, we calculate the general conditions for the QSL optimal dynamics, and study the connection between BLP non-Markovianity and QSL. In section 6 we study the initial state dependence of the QSL for the Markovian dynamics arising from Pauli and phase-covariant master equations. In section 7 we study the effects of Markov...

We present a general model of qubit dynamics which entails pure dephasing and dissipative time-local master equations. This allows us to describe the combined effect of thermalisation and dephasing beyond the usual Markovian approximation. We investigate the complete positivity conditions and introduce a heuristic model that is always physical and provides the correct Markovian limit. We study the effects of temperature on the non-Markovian behaviour of the system and show that the noise additivity property discussed by Yu and Eberly in Ref.[1] holds beyond the Markovian limit.

In any natural science, measurements are the essential link between theory and observable reality. Is it possible to obtain accurate and relevant information via measurement whose action on the probed system is unknown? In other words, can one be convinced to know something about the nature without knowing in detail how the information was obtained? In this paper, we show that the answer is, surprisingly, yes. We construct and experimentally implement a quantum optical probing measurement where measurements on the probes, i.e., the photons' polarization states, are used to extract information on the systems, i.e., the frequency spectra of the same photons. Unlike the preexisting probing protocols, our measurement does not require any knowledge of the interaction between the probe and the system.

We introduce the concept of fidelity for dynamical maps in an open quantum system scenario. We derive an inequality linking this quantity to the distinguishability of the inducing environmental states. Our inequality imposes constraints on the allowed set of dynamical maps arising from the microscopic description of system plus environment. Remarkably, the inequality involves only the states of the environment and the dynamical map of the open system and, therefore, does not rely on the knowledge of either the microscopic interaction Hamiltonian or the environmental Hamiltonian characteristic parameters. We demonstrate the power of our result by applying it to two different scenarios: quantum programming and quantum probing. In the first case we use it to derive bounds on the dimension of the processor for approximate programming of unitaries. In the second case we present an intriguing proof-of-principle demonstration of the ability to extract information on the environment via a quantum probe without any a priori assumption on the form of the system-environment coupling Hamiltonian.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures. Final ver 2: A substancial amount of new material including 1 new figure was adde

Open quantum systems and study of decoherence are important for our fundamental understanding of quantum physical phenomena. For practical purposes, a large number of quantum protocols exist that exploit quantum resources, e.g., entanglement, which allows us to go beyond what is possible to achieve by classical means. We combine concepts from open quantum systems and quantum information science and give a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration-with teleportation-that it is possible to implement efficiently a quantum protocol via a non-Markovian open system. The results show that, at the time of implementation of the protocol, it is not necessary to have the quantum resource in the degree of freedom used for the basic protocol-as long as there exists some other degree of freedom or the environment of an open system, which contains useful resources. The experiment is based on a pair of photons, where their polarizations act as open system qubits and frequencies as their environments, while the path degree of freedom of one of the photons represents the state of Alice's qubit to be teleported to Bob's polarization qubit.

We study the performance of two measures of non-Markovianity in detecting memory effects in two-qubit dephasing channels. By combining independent Markovian and non-Markovian noise on the qubits, our results show that the trace distance measure is able to detect the memory effects when at least one of the local channels displays non-Markovianity. A measure based on channel capacity, in turn, becomes non-zero when the global two-qubit dynamics shows memory effects. We apply these schemes to a well-known superdense coding protocol and demonstrate an optimal noise configuration to maximize the information transmission with independent local noises.