Competition between memory-keeping and memory-erasing decoherence channels

Understand

We study the competing effects of simultaneous Markovian and non-Markovian decoherence mechanisms acting on a single spin.

• We show the existence of a threshold in the relative strength of such mechanisms above which the spin dynamics becomes fully Markovian, as revealed by the use of several non-Markovianity measures.
• We identify a measure-dependent nested structure of such thresholds, hinting at a causality relationship amongst the various non-Markovianity witnesses used in our analysis.
• Our considerations are then used to argue the unavoidably non-Markovian evolution of a single-electron quantum dot exposed to both intrinsic and Markovian technical noise, the latter of arbitrary strength.