In the study of open quantum systems, memory effects are usually ignored, and this leads to dynamical semigroups and Markovian dynamics. However, in practice, non-Markovian dynamics is the rule rather than the exception. With the recent emergence of quantum information theory, there is a flurry of investigations of non-Markovian dynamics, and several significant measures for non-Markovianity are introduced from various perspectives such as deviation from divisibility, information exchange between a system and its environment, or entanglement with the environment. In this work, by exploiting the correlations flow between a system and an arbitrary ancillary, we propose a considerably intuitive measure for non-Markovianity by use of correlations as quantified by the quantum mutual information rather than entanglement. The fundamental properties, physical significance, and differences and relations with existing measures for non-Markovianity are elucidated. The measure captures quite directly and deeply the characteristics of non-Markovianity from the perspective of information. A simplified version based on Jamiołkowski-Choi isomorphism which encodes operations via bipartite states and does not involve any optimization is also proposed.

• Received 20 August 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.86.044101