We investigate the ability of correlation measures to witness non-Markovian open-quantum-system dynamics. It is shown that the mutual information and any entanglement measure between the system and an ancilla do not witness all non-Markovian dynamics. A correlation measure is introduced, and it is proven that, in an enlarged setting with two ancillary systems, this measure detects almost all non-Markovian dynamics, except possibly a zero-measure set of dynamics that is nonbijective in finite time intervals. Our proof is constructive and provides different initial states detecting the non-Markovian evolutions. These states are all separable and some are arbitrarily close to a product state. A further advantage of the introduced correlation measure is that it can be efficiently computed through semidefinite programming.

• Received 6 June 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.012303