Decoherence-free creation of atom-atom entanglement in cavity via fractional adiabatic passage

We propose a robust and decoherence insensitive scheme to generate controllable entangled states of two three-level atoms interacting with an optical cavity and a laser beam. Losses due to atomic spontaneous transitions and to cavity decay are efficiently suppressed by employing fractional adiabatic passage and appropriately designed atom-field couplings. In this scheme the two atoms traverse the cavity-mode and the laser beam in opposite directions as opposed to other entanglement schemes in which the atoms are required to have fixed locations inside a cavity. We also show that the coherence of a traveling atom can be transferred to the other one without populating the cavity-mode.