Nonsymmetric entanglement of atomic ensembles

The entanglement of multiatom quantum states is considered. In order to cancel noise due to inhomogeneous light-atom coupling, the concept of matched multiatom observables is proposed. As a means to eliminate an important form of decoherence this idea should be of broad relevance for quantum information processing with atomic ensembles. The general approach is illustrated on the example of rotation angle measurement, and it is shown that the multiatom states that were thought to be only weakly entangled can exhibit near-maximum entanglement.