Entangled coherent states: Teleportation and decoherence

When a superposition (\|α>-\|-α>) of two coherent states with opposite phase falls upon a 50-50 beam splitter, the resulting state is entangled. Remarkably, the amount of entanglement is exactly 1 ebit, irrespective of α, as was recently discovered by Hirota and Sasaki [LANL e-print quant-ph/0101018]. Here we discuss decoherence properties of such states and give a simple protocol that teleports one qubit encoded in Schrödinger cat states.