Efficient and High-Fidelity Entanglement in Cavity QED without High Cooperativity

The so-called state-carving protocol generates high-fidelity entangled states at an atom-cavity interface without requiring high cavity cooperativity. However, this protocol is limited to 50% efficiency, which restricts its applicability. We propose a simple modification to the state-carving protocol to achieve efficient entanglement generation, with unit probability in principle. Unlike previous two-photon schemes, ours employs only one photon which interacts with the atoms twice-avoiding separate photon detections which causes irrecoverable probability loss. We present a detailed description and performance evaluation of our protocol under nonideal conditions. High fidelity of 0.999 can be achieved with cavity cooperativity of only 34. Efficient state carving paves the way for large-scale entanglement generation at cavity interfaces for modular quantum computing, quantum repeaters, and creating arbitrary shaped atomic graph states, essential for one-way quantum computing.