Non-Markovian Quantum Trajectories for Open Systems

Abstract

We present a theory of non-Markovian quantum trajectories that describe the dynamics of a quantum system coupled to an environment of harmonic oscillators. When averaged over the noise, they reproduce the standard reduced density matrix without any approximation, in particular without Markov approximation. The time evolution of the environment can also be determined from these non-Markovian quantum trajectories. We present a simple example to demonstrate the power of our approach. As a remarkable feature of non-Markovian quantum trajectories, we show that for strong coupling to a dissipative environment with memory, the asymptotic state can be reached in a finite time. Further examples are described in the text.