Process tomography of field damping and measurement of Fock state lifetimes by quantum non-demolition photon counting in a cavity


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The relaxation of a quantum field stored in a high-$Q$ superconducting cavity is monitored by non-resonant Rydberg atoms. The field, subjected to repetitive quantum non-demolition (QND) photon counting, undergoes jumps between photon number states. We select ensembles of field realizations evolving from a given Fock state and reconstruct the subsequent evolution of their photon number distributions. We realize in this way a tomography of the photon number relaxation process yielding all the jump rates between Fock states. The damping rates of the $n$ photon states ($0leq n leq 7$) are found to increase linearly with $n$. The results are in excellent agreement with theory including a small thermal contribution.

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