Characterization of non-Markovianity with maximal extractable qubit-reservoir entanglement

Understanding the dynamical behavior of a qubit in a reservoir is critical to applications in quantum technological protocols, ranging from quantum computation to quantum metrology. The effect of the reservoir depends on the reservoir's spectral structure as well as on the qubit-reservoir coupling strength. We here propose a measure for quantifying the non-Markovian effect of a reservoir with a Lorentzian spectrum, based on the maximum qubit-reservoir quantum entanglement that can be extracted. Numerical simulation shows that this entanglement exhibits a monotonous behavior in response to the variation of the coupling strength. We confirm the validity of this measure with an experiment where a superconducting qubit is controllably coupled to a lossy resonator, which acts as a reservoir for the qubit. The experimental results illustrate that the maximal extractable entanglement is progressively increased with the strengthening of non-Markovianity.