Efficient universal leakage elimination for physical and encoded qubits

Decoherence-induced leakage errors can couple a physical or encoded qubit to other levels, thus potentially damaging the qubit. They can therefore be very detrimental in quantum information processing and require special attention. Here we present a general method for removing such errors by using simple decoupling and recoupling pulse sequences. The proposed gates are experimentally accessible in a variety of promising quantum-computing proposals.