Reduced Dynamics Need Not Be Completely Positive

Abstract

The reduced dynamics of a quantum system in contact with a reservoir is generally thought to be "completely positive"; this is certainly true if product initial conditions are used to define the dynamics. We show that with correlated initial conditions it need not be so. In this case the dynamics can properly be defined only on a subset of initial system states; extension, by linearity, to all possible initial states is trivially possible, but the extension may not be physically realizable and may not even be positive, let alone completely positive.