Imaging the interface of a qubit and its quantum-many-body environment

Decoherence affects all quantum systems, natural or artificial, and is the primary obstacle impeding quantum technologies. We show theoretically that for a Rydberg qubit in a Bose condensed environment, experiments can image the system-environment interface that is central for decoherence. High-precision absorption images of the condensed environment will be able to capture transient signals that show the real-time buildup of a mesoscopic entangled state in the environment. This is possible before decoherence sources other than the condensate itself can kick in, since qubit decoherence timescales can be tuned from the order of nanoseconds to microseconds by a choice of the excited Rydberg principal quantum number ν . Imaging the interface will allow detailed explorations of open quantum system concepts and may offer guidance for coherence protection in challenging scenarios with non-Markovian environments.