Locality and universality of quantum memory effects

Recently, a series of different measures quantifying memory effects in the quantum dynamics of open systems has been proposed. Here, we derive a mathematical representation for the non-Markovianity measure based on the exchange of information between the open system and its environment which substantially simplifies its numerical and experimental determination, and fully reveals the locality and universality of non-Markovianity in the quantum state space. We further illustrate the application of this representation by means of an all-optical experiment which allows the measurement of the degree of memory effects in a photonic quantum process with high accuracy.