Quantum Zeno effect in presence of engineered dissipation.

The quantum Zeno effect manifests itself as the freezing of the quantum state of a system subject to repeated measurements. Decay processes, like the spontaneous emission of a photon from a cavity into the environment, are generally modelled using a Markovian environment, and , in that framework, they should not be submitted to the quantum Zeno effect. A decay process, however, can in principle be frozen if the system is measured fast enough such that the Markov approximation breaks. In this talk, we present experiments to demonstrate how the decay of a photon from a cavity into an engineered environment can be reduced by exploiting the non-Markovian nature of the bath. The experiment is implemented in a circuit QED architecture, where a photon is initially placed in a 3-D microwave cavity, and the bath is engineered such that the photon decays through another cavity into which it is swapped using a transmon qubit. Experimental investigation of the "no-click" evolution of the system when a photodetector is placed in this engineered loss channel will be presented.