Creation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states with thousands of atoms by entanglement amplification

Abstract We propose an entanglement-creation scheme in a multi-atom ensemble trapped in an optical cavity, named entanglement amplification, converting unentangled states into entangled states and amplifying less-entangled ones to maximally entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states whose fidelity is logarithmically dependent on the atom number and robust against common experimental noises. The scheme starts with a multi-atom ensemble initialized in a coherent spin state. By shifting the energy of a particular Dicke state, we break the Hilbert space of the ensemble into two isolated subspaces to tear the coherent spin state into two components so that entanglement is introduced. After that, we utilize the isolated subspaces to further enhance the entanglement by coherently separating the two components. By single-particle Rabi drivings on atoms in a high-finesse optical cavity illuminated by a single-frequency light, 2000-atom GHZ states can be created with a fidelity above 80% in an experimentally achievable system, making resources of ensembles at Heisenberg limit practically available for quantum metrology.