Yanan Liu, Hongting Song, Areeya Chantasri, Howard M. Wiseman

Preserving quantum coherence in the presence of environmental noise is one of the principal challenges for quantum technologies. Noise mitigation using spectator qubits (SQs) has recently emerged as a promising approach, enabling indirect probing of the noise without disturbing the data qubit (DQ). However, existing analyses that probe ultimate performance have been restricted to two-state random telegraph process noise, which does not capture more complex noise processes that may arise in the environment. Therefore, we here develop a SQ-based noise mitigation for DQs subject to general multi-level fluctuator noise. We first derive the coherence dynamics of the DQ under such noise, then develop a mitigation scheme in which information about the noise is inferred from sequential SQ measurements and used for phase correction. A memory-efficient heuristic adaptive protocol is proposed to dynamically select the SQ measurement time and angle based on the current noise estimate. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed strategy significantly suppresses decoherence under multi-level noise, achieving performance comparable to that in the two-level case despite the increased complexity of the noise process.