Protection of qubit-coherence on a Bloch sphere

Abstract

Single qubit pure state is a fundamental resource in quantum information and quantum computation. Therefore, it is of great importance to protect the coherence of single qubits against decoherence. In this letter, we demonstrate that decoherence caused by spontaneous emission can be effectively suppressed by adding a universal static external field. In order to have an intuitive view to the protection effects and its physical mechanisms, we study the coherence evolution of a single qubit on a Bloch sphere. We can clearly see that different external resonant drivings can rotate the Bloch vector around different axes, and the steady-state solution of the master equation (under protection) are visualized on the Bloch sphere. Furthermore, the frequency detuning between the qubit system and the driving is taken into account, and the results show that our protection scheme still works fine in the detuned cases and the smaller the detuning is, the better the protection effect is. In addition, this protocol can protect the coherence of single qubit states with a wide range of driving parameters, and help people to design simple coherence protection schemes for qubit states. The simplicity and the abundance of the current scheme may warrant its experimental realization.