Complete positivity and dissipative factorized dynamics: some comments

Abstract

After reviewing the main properties of time-evolutions of open quantum systems, some considerations about the positivity of factorized Markovian dynamics for bipartite systems are made. In particular, it is shown that the positivity of the whole time-evolution in general does not ask for the complete positivity of the single system time-evolutions, if they are allowed to differ. However, they must be completely positive if one is a small perturbation of the other, which is the typical situation for open systems in a heat bath.

Proceedings of the VI Workshop on Time Asymmetric Quantum Theory (Lisboa, Portugal - July 2003), Latex, 10 pages