Local entanglement in a bimodal high- Q cavity: Production and utilization

A new conditional scheme for entangling the two quantized modes of a bimodal high-Q cavity field is presented. We show that, injecting one at time k atoms inside the cavity, it is possible to guide the field toward k-dependent linear combinations of k + 1 bimodal Fock states, each one possessing the same total number of photons. The two simple cases corresponding to the passage of one or two atoms only through the resonator are considered. Their practical feasibility against cavity losses, spontaneous emission and other sources of imprecision of the experimental set-up is discussed. Two examples illustrating the usefulness of and the interest toward the creation of such a local entanglement, are reported. The first one relates the specific features of these bimodal entangled states to the occurrence of a non-classical correlation effect in the dynamics of a two-level atom interacting with the entangled cavity. The second one demonstrates that the peculiar entanglement initially stored in the cavity in accordance with our method, provides an effectively exploitable resource to entangle two spatially separated cavities.