ECAMP 15

Collective atomic or solid-state excitations present important advantages for encoding qubits, such as strong directional coupling to light. Unfortunately, they are plagued by inhomogeneities between the emitters, which make the qubit decay into a quasi-continuum of dark states. In most cases, this process is non-Markovian. Through a simple and resource-efficient formalism, we unveil a regime where the decay is suppressed by a combination of driving and non-Markovianity. We experimentally demonstrate this "driving protection" using a Rydberg superatom, extending its coherent dynamics beyond the characteristic free decay time by an order of magnitude [1].

[1] A. Covolo et al, arXiv:2501.07232.