<i>Colloquium</i>: Non-Markovian dynamics in open quantum systems

Abstract

An ongoing theme in quantum physics is the interaction of small quantum systems with an environment. If that environment has many degrees of freedom and is weakly coupled, it can often be reasonable to treat its decohering effect on the small system using a ``memoryless,'' or Markovian description. This Colloquium shows that for many phenomena a more refined, non-Markovian, treatment is necessary. The suite of developing theoretical tools is reviewed, with which recent progress on this problem has been based.