Reply I to 'Comment on 'Some implications of the quantum nature of laser fields for quantum computations''

We show that Itano's arguments confirm our conclusion, that entanglement of the atom with the laser field contributes a small but nonzero amount to the total decoherence of an atom in a laser field. This small effect scales as 1/(n) over bar with (n) over bar the average number of photons in the laser pulse.