Motivated by the recent discovery of situations where cosmological fluctuations recohere during inflation, we investigate the relationship between quantum recoherence (late-time purification after a transient phase of decoherence), adiabaticity, and Markovianity. To that end, we study a simple setup of two linearly coupled harmonic oscillators, and compute the purity of one oscillator when the interaction is switched off. We find that there exists a critical value for the coupling strength below which the purity oscillates and above which it decays exponentially. This decay cannot be captured by perturbation theory; hence, decoherence is always a nonperturbative phenomenon. When the interaction is turned off, the purity either freezes to its value prior to the turn-off, or it smoothly goes back to a value very close to one (recoherence). This depends on the rate at which the turn-off occurs. We thus develop a new adiabatic-expansion scheme and find complete recoherence at any finite order in the inverse turn-off time. Therefore, decoherence is always a nonadiabatic effect. The critical value of the turn-off time above which recoherence takes place is then expressed in terms of the other time scales of the problem. Finally, we show that the dynamics of the system is never Markovian, even when decoherence takes place. We introduce a new measure of Markovianity dubbed the Bures velocity and use it to optimize Markovian approximations.

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• Inflation
• Open quantum systems & decoherence
• Quantum correlations in quantum information
• Quantum harmonic oscillator
• Quantum-to-classical transition