Entangled W State Generation via Adiabatic Passage in Cavity QED

A scheme is proposed to generate W state of N atoms trapped in a cavity, based on adiabatic passage along dark state. Taking advantage of adiabaticpassage, the atoms have no probability of being excited and thus the atomicspontaneous emission is suppressed. The scheme is simple. It does not needto adjust the interaction time accurately, and does not need to prepare thecavity field in one-photon state. Numerical simulation shows that thesuccessful probability of the scheme increases with the increasing of the atom number.