Ancilla-assisted protection of information: application to atom–cavity systems

One of the major obstacles faced by quantum-enabled technology is the environmental noise that causes decoherence in the quantum system, thereby destroying much of its quantum aspects and introducing errors while the system undergoes quantum operations and processing. A number of techniques have been invented to mitigate the environmental effects, and many of these techniques are specific to the environment and the quantum tasks at hand. Here, we propose a protocol that makes arbitrary environments effectively noise-free or transparent using an ancilla, which, in particular, is well suited to protect information stored in atoms. The ancilla, which is the photons, is allowed to undergo restricted but a wide class of noisy operations. The protocol transfers the information of the system onto the decoherence-free subspace and later retrieves it back to the system. Consequently, it enables full protection of quantum information and entanglement in the atomic system from decoherence. We propose experimental schemes to implement this protocol on atomic systems in an optical cavity.