Verification of a resetting protocol for an uncontrolled superconducting qubit

Quantum resetting protocols allow a quantum system to be sent to a state in the past by making it interact with quantum probes when neither the free evolution of the system nor the interaction is controlled. We experimentally verify the simplest non-trivial case of a quantum resetting protocol, known as the mathcal{W}₄ protocol, with five superconducting qubits, testing it with different types of free evolutions and target-probe interactions. After projection, we obtained a reset state fidelity as high as 0.951, and the process fidelity was found to be 0.792. We also implemented 100 randomly-chosen interactions and demonstrated an average success probability of 0.323 for |1rangle and 0.292 for |-rangle, experimentally confirmed the nonzero probability of success for unknown interactions; the numerical simulated values are about 0.3. Our experiment shows that the simplest quantum resetting protocol can be implemented with current technologies, making such protocols a valuable tool in the eternal fight against unwanted evolution in quantum systems.