Master Equation Emulation and Coherence Preservation with Classical Control of a Superconducting Qubit

Open quantum systems are a topic of intense theoretical research. The use of master equations to model a system's evolution subject to an interaction with an external environment is one of the most successful theoretical paradigms. General experimental tools to study different open system realizations have been limited, and so it is highly desirable to develop experimental tools which emulate diverse master equation dynamics and give a way to test open systems theories. We demonstrate a systematic method for engineering specific system-environment interactions and emulating non-Markovian master equations of a particular form–generalized Markovian master equations–using classical stochastic noise. We show numerical simulations and experimental data demonstrating the successful emulation of generalized Markovian environments. We also demonstrate that non-Markovian noise can be used as a resource to extend the coherence of a quantum system and counteract the adversarial effects of Markovian environments. Lastly, we present a method for generating noise of arbitrary memory kernels, thus enabling the emulation of more complicated dynamics.