Quantifying the influence of the initial state on the dynamics of an open quantum system

Understand

A small system in contact with a macroscopic environment usually approaches an asymptotic state, determined only by some macroscopic properties of the environment such as the temperature or the chemical potential.

• In the long-time limit, the state of the small system is thus expected to be independent of its initial state.
• In some situations, however, the asymptotic state of the system is influenced by its initial state and some information about the initial state is kept for all times.
• Motivated by this finding, we propose a measure to quantify the influence of the initial state of an open system on its dynamics.