Continuous variables approach to entanglement creation and processing

Abstract: We apply the continuous variable approach to study entangled dynamics of coupled harmonic oscillators interacting with a thermal reservoir and to a deterministic creation of entanglement in an atomic ensemble located inside a high-Q ring cavity. In the case of harmonic oscillators, we show that a suitable unitary transformation of the position and momentum operators transforms the system to a set of independent harmonic oscillators with only one of them coupled to the reservoir. Working in the Wigner representation of the density operator, we find that the covariance matrix has a block diagonal form of smaller size matrices. This simple property allows to treat the problem to some extend analytically. We analyze the time evolution of an initial entanglement and find that the entanglement can persists for long times due to presence of constants of motion for the covariance matrix elements. In the case of an atomic ensemble located inside the cavity, the attention is focused on creation of one and two-mode continuous variable entangled states from the vacuum by applying laser pulses of a suitably adjusted amplitudes and phases. The pulses together with the cavity dissipation prepare the collective modes of the atomic ensemble in a desired entangled state.