Cavity-loss-induced generation of entangled atoms

We discuss the generation of entangled states or two two-level atoms inside an optical resonator. When the cavity decay is continuously monitored, the absence of photon counts is associated with the presence of an atomic enta ngled state. In addition to being conceptually simple, this scheme can be d emonstrated with presently available technology. We describe how such a sta te is generated through conditional dynamics, using quantum jump methods, i ncluding both cavity damping and spontaneous emission decay, and evaluate t he fidelity and relative entropy of entanglement of the generated state com pared with the target entangled state. [S1050-2947(99)08303-1].