The benefit of doing things slowly : employing dissipation for the robust creation of entanglement between ions in spatially separate cavities

We present protocol that allows the generation of a maximallyentangled state between individual atoms held in spatiallyseparate cavities. Under ideal conditions, the scheme isdeterministic. In a realistic setting, when the the atom-cavityinteraction may be weak, and the detectors are imperfect, we showthat the scheme is robust against experimental inefficiencies andyields probabilistic entanglement of very high fidelity.