Preserving entanglement in a solid-spin system using quantum autoencoders

Entanglement, as a key resource for modern quantum technologies, is extremely fragile due to the decoherence. Here, we show that a quantum autoencoder, which is trained to compress a particular set of quantum entangled states into a subspace that is robust to decoherence, can be employed to preserve entanglement. The training process is based on a hybrid quantum-classical approach to improve the efficiency in building the autoencoder and reduce the experimental errors during the optimization. Using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, we demonstrate that the entangled states between the electron and nuclear spins can be encoded into the nucleus subspace, which has much longer coherence time. As a result, lifetime of the Bell states in this solid-spin system is extended from 2.22 ± 0.43 μs to 3.03 ± 0.56 ms, yielding a three orders of magnitude improvement. The quantum autoencoder approach is universal, paving the way of utilizing long lifetime nuclear spins as immediate-access quantum memories in quantum information tasks.