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

  1. Uri Goldblatt,
  2. Nitzan Kahn,
  3. Sergey Hazanov,
  4. Ofir Milul,
  5. Barkay Guttel,
  6. Lalit M. Joshi,
  7. Daniel Chausovsky,
  8. Fabien Lafont,
  9. and Serge Rosenblum
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.

A superconducting quantum memory with tens of milliseconds coherence time

  1. Ofir Milul,
  2. Barkay Guttel,
  3. Uri Goldblatt,
  4. Sergey Hazanov,
  5. Lalit M. Joshi,
  6. Daniel Chausovsky,
  7. Nitzan Kahn,
  8. Engin Çiftyürek,
  9. Fabien Lafont,
  10. and Serge Rosenblum
Storing quantum information for an extended period of time is essential for running quantum algorithms with low errors. Currently, superconducting quantum memories have coherence times
of a few milliseconds, and surpassing this performance has remained an outstanding challenge. In this work, we report a qubit encoded in a novel superconducting cavity with a coherence time of 34 ms, an improvement of over an order of magnitude compared to previous demonstrations. We use this long-lived quantum memory to store a Schrödinger cat state with a record size of 1024 photons, indicating the cavity’s potential for bosonic quantum error correction.