Ensembles of solid-state optical emitters enable broadband quantum storage and transduction of photonic qubits, with applications in high-rate optical quantum networks for secure communications, global time-keeping, and interconnecting future quantum computers. To realize coherent quantum information transfer using ensembles, spin rephasing techniques are currently used to mitigate fast decoherence resulting from inhomogeneous broadening. Here we use a dense ensemble of neodymium rare-earth ions strongly coupled to a nanophotonic resonator to demonstrate that decoherence of a single photon excitation is near-completely suppressed via cavity protection- a new technique for accessing the decoherence-free subspace of collective coupling. The protected Rabi oscillations between the cavity field and the atomic superradiant state thereby enable ultra-fast transfer of photonic frequency qubits (~50 GHz bandwidth) into the ions, followed by retrieval with 98.7% fidelity. By coupling the superradiant excitation to other long-lived rare-earth spin states, this technology will enable broadband, always-ready quantum memories and fast optical-to-microwave transducers.
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