Construction of propagators for divisible dynamical maps

Abstract

Divisible dynamical maps play an important role in characterizing Markovianity on the level of quantum evolution. Divisible maps provide an important generalization of Markovian semigroups. Usually one analyzes either completely positive or just positive divisibility meaning that the corresponding propagators are defined in terms of completely positive or positive maps, respectively. For maps which are invertible at any moment of time the very existence of propagator is already guaranteed and hence the only issue is (complete) positivity and trace-preservation. However, for maps which are not invertible the problem is much more involved since even the existence of a propagator is not guaranteed. In this paper we propose a simple method to construct propagators of dynamical maps using the concept of generalized inverse. We analyze both time-continuous and time-discrete maps. Since the generalized inverse is not uniquely defined the same applies for the corresponding propagator. In simple examples of qubit evolution we analyze it turns out that the additional requirement of complete positivity possibly makes the propagator unique.