Engineering multipartite steady entanglement of distant atoms via dissipation

We propose a scheme for generating an entangled state for three atoms trapped in separate optical cavities that are coupled to each other through two optical fibers based on coherent driving and dissipation, which are induced by the classical fields and the decay of non-local bosonic modes, respectively. In our scheme, the interaction time need not be controlled strictly in the overall dynamics process, and the cavity field decay can be changed into a vital resource. The numerical simulation shows that the fidelity of the target state is insensitive to atomic spontaneous emission, and our scheme is good enough to generate the W state of distant atoms with a high fidelity and purity. In addition, the present scheme can also be generalized to prepare the N-partite W state of distant atoms.