Rosenblum Lab

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 identify 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 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 implementing long-lived cavity qubits with high-fidelity gates and can enable more efficient bosonic quantum error correction codes.

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 single-photon qubit encoded in a novel superconducting cavity with a coherence time of 34 ms, representing an order of magnitude improvement 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.