Recovering quantum coherence of a cavity qubit through environment monitoring and active feedback

Decoherence in qubits, caused by their interaction with a noisy environment, poses a significant challenge to developing reliable quantum processors. Monitoring the qubit’s environment enables not only to flag decoherence events but also to reverse these errors, thereby restoring the qubit coherence. This approach is particularly beneficial for superconducting cavity qubits, whose unavoidable interaction with auxiliary transmons impacts their coherence. In this work, we uncover the intricate dynamics of cavity qubit decoherence by tracking the noisy trajectory of a transmon acting as the cavity’s environment. Using real-time feedback, we successfully recover the lost coherence of the cavity qubit, achieving a fivefold increase in its dephasing time. Alternatively, by detecting transmon errors and converting them into erasures, we improve the cavity phase coherence by more than an order of magnitude. These advances are essential for using cavity qubits with low photon loss rates as long-lived quantum memories with high-fidelity gates and can enable more efficient bosonic quantum error correction codes.