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.