Reduced dynamics of a PT-symmetric evolution

Abstract: Evolutions under non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with unbroken PT-symmetry can be considered unitary under appropriate choices of inner products, facilitated by the so-called metric operator. While it is understood that the choice of the metric operator has no bearing on the description of the system, in this work we show that this choice does dictate the properties of the subsystem. Subsystem dynamics therefore does depend on the choice of the metric. We argue that this result is a reformulation of the previously known result that the set of observables, chosen to characterize the state, determines its decomposition into subsystems. In this work we take a non-Hermitian PT-symmetric quantum walk with an internal and external degree of freedom to show this. The Hamiltonian of the quantum walk is chosen to not allow a metric operator with a tensor product structure over these subspaces. Under these constraints, we investigate the properties of the internal state of the system under different choices of the metric operator and show that properties like bipartite entanglement and non-Markovianity depend on the choice of the metric operator.