The remarkable discovery of Quantum Error Correction (QEC), which can overcome the errors experienced by a bit of quantum information (qubit), was a critical advance that gives hope for eventually realizing practical quantum computers. In principle, a system that implements QEC can actually pass a break-even point and preserve quantum information for longer than the lifetime of its constituent parts. Reaching the break-even point, however, has thus far remained an outstanding and challenging goal. Several previous works have demonstrated elements of QEC in NMR, ions, nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers, photons, and superconducting transmons. However, these works primarily illustrate the signatures or scaling properties of QEC codes rather than test the capacity of the system to extend the lifetime of quantum information over time. Here we demonstrate a QEC system that reaches the break-even point by suppressing the natural errors due to energy loss for a qubit logically encoded in superpositions of coherent states, or cat states of a superconducting resonator. Moreover, the experiment implements a full QEC protocol by using real-time feedback to encode, monitor naturally occurring errors, decode, and correct. As measured by full process tomography, the enhanced lifetime of the encoded information is 320 microseconds without any post-selection. This is 20 times greater than that of the systems transmon, over twice as long as an uncorrected logical encoding, and 10% longer than the highest quality element of the system (the resonators 0, 1 Fock states). Our results illustrate the power of novel, hardware efficient qubit encodings over traditional QEC schemes. Furthermore, they advance the field of experimental error correction from confirming the basic concepts to exploring the metrics that drive system performance and the challenges in implementing a fault-tolerant system.
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