English

Dark spin-cats as biased qubits

Quantum Physics 2025-07-11 v2

Abstract

We present a biased atomic qubit, universally implementable across all atomic platforms, encoded as a `spin-cat' within ground state Zeeman levels. The key characteristic of our configuration is the coupling of the ground state spin manifold of size Fg1F_g \gg 1 to an excited Zeeman spin manifold of size Fe=Fg1F_e = F_g - 1 using light. This coupling results in eigenstates of the driven atom that include exactly two dark states in the ground state manifold, which are decoupled from light and immune to spontaneous emission from the excited states. These dark states constitute the `spin-cat', leading to the designation `dark spin-cat'. We demonstrate that under strong Rabi drive and for large FgF_g, the `dark spin-cat' is autonomously stabilized against common noise sources and encodes a qubit with significantly biased noise. Specifically, the bit-flip error rate decreases exponentially with FgF_g relative to the dephasing rate. We provide an analysis of dark spin-cats, their robustness to noise, and discuss bias-preserving single qubit and entangling gates, exemplified on a Rydberg tweezer platform.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.04421,
  title  = {Dark spin-cats as biased qubits},
  author = {Andreas Kruckenhauser and Ming Yuan and Han Zheng and Mikhail Mamaev and Pei Zeng and Xuanhui Mao and Qian Xu and Torsten V. Zache and Liang Jiang and Rick van Bijnen and Peter Zoller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.04421},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:07:39.217Z