Decoherence control in optical cavities

Summary form only given.Decoherence, i.e., the rapid destruction of the phase relation between two quantum states of a system caused by the entanglement of these two states with two different states of the environment, is the main limiting factor for quantum information processing. For this reason, decoherence control is now becoming a rapidly expanding field of investigation. Decoherence control would be particularly useful in high-Q electromagnetic cavities. In fact, one of the few experimental realizations of a quantum gate is the Caltech´s quantum phase gate, demonstrating conditional quantum dynamics between polarized modes in a high-finesse optical cavity. Moreover, the progressive decoherence of a mesoscopic Schrodinger cat state has been observed for the first time in the experiment of Brune et al. (1996) where the linear superposition of two coherent states of a field in a microwave cavity, with classically distinct phases, has been generated and detected. Here we propose a photodetection-mediated feedback scheme based on a very simple idea: whenever a photon leaks out from the cavity and is detected by a photodetector, a feedback loop supplies the cavity mode with another photon, using a single ion trapped in the cavity and appropriately shaped laser pulses.