Deterministic generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs in a cavity-QED system

Abstract: We propose a cavity-QED scheme that can deterministically generate Einstein-Podosky-Rosen polarization-entangled photon pairs. A four-level tripod atom successively couples to two high-Q optical cavities possessing polarization degeneracy, assisted by a classical $\pi$-polarized pump field. The stimulated Raman adiabatic passage process in the atom-cavity system is used to produce the polarization-entangled photon pairs. The proposal is particularly robust against atomic spontaneous decay, which should have potential applications in quantum information processing.