Abstract
Population leakage outside the qubit subspace presents a particularly harmful source of error that cannot be handled by standard error correction methods. Using a trapped Yb ion, we demonstrate an optical pumping scheme to suppress leakage errors in atomic hyperfine qubits. The selection rules and narrow linewidth of a quadrupole transition are used to selectively pump population out of leakage states and back into the qubit subspace. Each pumping cycle reduces the leakage population by a factor of , allowing for an exponential suppression in the number of cycles. We use interleaved randomized benchmarking on the qubit subspace to show that this pumping procedure has negligible side-effects on un-leaked qubits, bounding the induced qubit memory error by per cycle, and qubit population decay to per cycle. These results clear a major obstacle for implementations of quantum error correction and error mitigation protocols.