Rosenblum Lab

Single-photon nonlinearity, namely, the change in the response of the system as the result of the interaction with a single photon, is generally considered an inherent property of a single quantum emitter. Although the dependence on the number of emitters is well understood for the case of two-level systems, deterministic operations such as single-photon switching or photon-atom gates inherently require more complex level structures. Here, we theoretically consider single-photon switching in ensembles of emitters with a Λ-level scheme and show that the switching efficiency vanishes with the number of emitters. Interestingly, the mechanism behind this behavior is the quantum Zeno effect, manifested in a slowdown of the photon-controlled dynamics of the atomic ground states.

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.