Environmental Memory as a Control Resource for Quantum Coherence

Environmental Memory as a Control Resource for Quantum Coherence Abstract The dominant paradigm in quantum technologies relies on suppressing environmental interactions to approximate a Markovian bath. While effective for isolated components at cryogenic temperatures, this strategy faces scaling and energetic constraints. Here we propose an alternative control framework in which structured environmental correlations are reconstructed and actively exploited. Using a memory-kernel description of open-system dynamics, we show that control fields can be designed to selectively sample stable spectral features of the environment, transforming it from a source of decoherence into a phase reference. This leads to a falsifiable prediction: a localized “coherence ridge” in the control landscape, where the effective coherence time increases under phase-matched driving. We formulate experimental protocols and mechanism- breaking ablations that distinguish genuine memory-assisted stabilization from drift or estimator bias. The results recast robustness as synchronization with environmental memory rather than isolation from noise.