Cavity-Assisted Quantum Bath Engineering

We demonstrate quantum bath engineering for a superconducting artificial atom coupled to a microwave cavity. By tailoring the spectrum of microwave photon shot noise in the cavity, we create a dissipative environment that autonomously relaxes the atom to an arbitrarily specified coherent superposition of the ground and excited states. In the presence of background thermal excitations, this mechanism increases state purity and effectively cools the dressed atom state to a low temperature.