Preprint · May 2026
Nonclassical energy-change distribution as a witness of non-Markovian quantum dynamics
Preprint, arXiv:2605.26818 (2026)
Abstract
We address the problem of identifying non-Markovian quantum time evolutions of an open quantum system by only performing measurements of the system’s energy. We demonstrate that violations of CP-divisibility are always witnessed by non-positive values of the energy-change Kirkwood-Dirac quasiprobability distribution associated with the system’s Hamiltonian, evaluated at consecutive times. The link between non CP-divisibility and non-positivity of the system’s energy-change distribution is stronger when the system-environment interactions are energy-preserving. The witness works whenever anomalous energy fluxes, due to non-Markovianity, are realized. Anomalous fluxes are also detected by the non-Markovianity measure built over the quantum mutual information between the states of the open system and of a quantum correlated reference.
Cite
@misc{pezzutto2026nonclassicalenergychangedistributionwitness,
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
author = {Marco Pezzutto and Anton Corr and Gabriele De Chiara and Salvatore Lorenzo and Stefano Gherardini},
eprint = {2605.26818},
month = {May},
primaryclass = {quant-ph},
title = {Nonclassical energy-change distribution as a witness of non-Markovian quantum dynamics},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26818},
year = {2026}
}