Quantifying the nonclassicality of pure dephasing

One of the central problems in quantum theory is to characterize, detect, and quantify quantumness in terms of classical strategies. Dephasing processes, caused by non-dissipative information exchange between quantum systems and environments, provides a natural platform for this purpose, as they control the quantum-to-classical transition. Recently, it has been shown that dephasing dynamics itself can exhibit (non)classical traits, depending on the nature of the system-environment correlations and the related (im)possibility to simulate these dynamics with Hamiltonian ensembles–the classical strategy. Here we establish the framework of detecting and quantifying the nonclassicality for pure dephasing dynamics. The uniqueness of the canonical representation of Hamiltonian ensembles is shown, and a constructive method to determine the latter is presented. We illustrate our method for qubit, qutrit, and qubit-pair pure dephasing and describe how to implement our approach with quantum process tomography experiments. Our work is readily applicable to present-day quantum experiments.