Experimental Realization of Decoherence-Free Subspace in Neutron Interferometry

A decoherence-free subspace (DFS) is an important class of quantum-error-correcting (QEC) codes that have been proposed for fault-tolerant quantum computation. The applications of QEC techniques, however, are not limited to quantum-information processing (QIP). Here we demonstrate how QEC codes may be used to improve experimental designs of quantum devices to achieve noise suppression. In particular, neutron interferometry is used as a test bed to show the potential for adding quantum error correction to quantum measurements. We built a five-blade neutron interferometer that incorporates both a standard Mach-Zender configuration and a configuration based on a DFS. Experiments verify that the DFS interferometer is protected against low-frequency mechanical vibrations. We anticipate these improvements will increase the range of applications for matter-wave interferometry.