  Characterizing a quantum process is the critical first step towards applying
such a process in a quantum information protocol. Full process characterization
is known to be extremely resource-intensive, motivating the search for more
efficient ways to extract salient information about the process. An example is
the identification of "decoherence-free subspaces", in which computation or
communications may be carried out, immune to the principal sources of
decoherence in the system. Here we propose and demonstrate a protocol which
enables one to directly identify a DFS without carrying out a full
reconstruction. Our protocol offers an up-to-quadratic speedup over standard
process tomography. In this paper, we experimentally identify the DFS of a
two-qubit process with 32 measurements rather than the usual 256, characterize
the robustness and efficiency of the protocol, and discuss its extension to
higher-dimensional systems.
