Engineered entanglement of three systems in cavity quantum electrodynamics

Summary form only given. Entanglement is one of the most striking features of quantum mechanics and was a source of many debates among the early founders of this theory. More recently, entanglement was considered as one of the key points in the field of quantum information processing. Those potential applications require however the deterministic production of entanglement implying a large number of subsystems. Spontaneous phenomena, generally used to entangle 2 systems, are therefore not easily extendable towards those requirements. Recent works have succeeded in producing entangled state of three or more particles by using spontaneous parametric down-conversion or a unitary operation on a ensemble of trapped ions. We have created an entangled state between two atoms and a mode of the electromagnetic field stored in a cavity. The particles are separated by centimetric distances, which allows for individual addressing. The entangled state is prepared by unitary reversible operations acting on one or two of the particles at the same time. The analysis of the state is performed by detecting correlations between individual observables.