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 $$\left|1\right\rangle$$ and 0.292 for $$\left|-\right\rangle$$ , and 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.