Multi-atom entanglement engineering and phase-covariant cloning via adiabatic passage

A scheme is proposed for the generation of entangled states for multiple atoms trapped in an optical cavity via adiabatic passage. In the scheme, both the atomic system and the cavity have no probability of being excited. Thus both the atomic spontaneous emission and the cavity decay are suppressed, which makes our scheme very robust against decoherence. Taking advantage of the adiabatic process, the scheme does not require accurate adjustment of the interaction time. Furthermore, the scheme is scalable in principle. The idea can also be used for realizing phase-covariant cloning.