Collapse and revival structure of information backflow for a central spin coupled to a finite spin bath

Abstract

The Markovianity of quantum dynamics is an important property of open quantum systems determined by various ingredients of the system and bath. Apart from the system-bath interaction, the initial state of the bath, etc., the dimension of the bath plays a critical role in determining the Markovianity of quantum dynamics, as a strict decay of the bath correlations requires an infinite dimension for the bath. In this work, we investigate the role of finite bath dimension in the Markovianity of quantum dynamics by considering a simple but nontrivial model in which a central spin is isotropically coupled to a finite number of bath spins, and show how the dynamics of the central spin transits from non-Markovian to Markovian as the number of the bath spins increases. The non-Markovianity is characterized by the information backflow from the bath to the system in terms of the trace distance of the system states. We derive the time evolution of the trace distance analytically, and find periodic collapse-revival patterns in the information flow. The mechanism underlying this phenomenon is investigated in detail, and it shows that the period of the collapse-revival pattern is determined by the competition between the number of the bath spins, the system-bath coupling strength, and the frequency detuning. When the number of bath spins is sufficiently large, the period of the collapse-revival structure as well as the respective collapse and revival times increase in proportion to the number of the bath spins, which characterizes how the information backflow decays with a large dimension of the bath. We also analyze the effect of the system-bath interaction strength and frequency detuning on the collapse-revival patterns of the information flow, and obtain the condition for the existence of the collapse-revival structure. The results are illustrated by numerical computation.