English

Markovianization with approximate unitary designs

Quantum Physics 2021-06-10 v2

Abstract

Memoryless processes are ubiquitous in nature, in contrast with the mathematics of open systems theory, which states that non-Markovian processes should be the norm. This discrepancy is usually addressed by subjectively making the environment forgetful. Here we prove that there are physical non-Markovian processes that with high probability look highly Markovian for all orders of correlations; we call this phenomenon Markovianization. Formally, we show that when a quantum process has dynamics given by an approximate unitary design, a large deviation bound on the size of non-Markovian memory is implied. We exemplify our result employing an efficient construction of an approximate unitary circuit design using two-qubit interactions only, showing how seemingly simple systems can speedily become forgetful. Conversely, since the process is closed, it should be possible to detect the underlying non-Markovian effects. However, for these processes, observing non-Markovian signatures would require highly entangling resources and hence be a difficult task.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.07620,
  title  = {Markovianization with approximate unitary designs},
  author = {Pedro Figueroa-Romero and Felix A. Pollock and Kavan Modi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07620},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

6+9 pages, 5 figures. Published version, only presentation changes

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:53:40.053Z