Quantum process discrimination with information from environment

In quantum metrology we usually extract information from the reduced probe system but ignore the information lost inevitably into the environment. However, K. Molmer [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 040401 (2015)] showed that the information lost into the environment has an important effect on improving the successful probability of quantum process discrimination. Here we reconsider the model of a driven atom coupled to an environment and distinguish which of two candidate Hamiltonians governs the dynamics of the whole system. We mainly discuss two measurement methods, one of which obtains only the information from the reduced atom state and the other obtains the information from both the atom and its environment. Interestingly, for the two methods the optimal initial states of the atom, used to improve the successful probability of the process discrimination, are different. By comparing the two methods we find that the partial information from the environment is very useful for the discriminations.