Irreversibility mitigation in unital non-Markovian quantum evolutions

Abstract

The relation between thermodynamic entropy production and non-Markovian evolutions is a matter of current research. Here, we study the behavior of the stochastic entropy production in open quantum systems undergoing unital non-Markovian dynamics. In particular, for the family of Pauli channels we show that in some specific time intervals both the average entropy production and the variance can decrease, provided that the quantum dynamics fails to be positive divisible, i.e. it is essentially non-Markovian. Although the dynamics of the system is overall irreversible, our result may be interpreted as a transient tendency towards reversibility, described as a delta-peaked distribution of entropy production around zero. Finally, we also provide analytical bounds on the parameters in the generator giving rise to the quantum system dynamics, so as to ensure irreversibility mitigation of the corresponding non-Markovian evolution.