Dissipatively driven entanglement of two macroscopic atomic ensembles

Up to now, the lifetime of experimentally demonstrated entangled states has been limited due to their fragility under decoherence and dissipation. Therefore, they are created under strict isolation conditions. In contrast, new approaches harness the coupling of the system to the environment, which drives the system into the desired state. Following these ideas, we present a robust method for generating steady-state entanglement between two distant atomic ensembles. The proposed scheme relies on the interaction of the two atomic systems with the common vacuum modes of an electromagnetic field which act as an engineered environment. We develop the theoretical framework for two-level systems, including dipole-dipole interactions, and complement it by considering its implementation in multilevel ground states. Based on these results, the realization of entanglement generation by engineered dissipation has been experimentally demonstrated [H. Krauter, C. A. Muschik, K. Jensen, W. Wasilewski, J. M. Petersen, J. I. Cirac, and E. S. Polzik, e-print arXiv:1006.4344].