The benefit of doing things slowly: employing dissipation for the robust creation of entanglement between ions in spatially separate cavities

We present protocol that allows the generation of a maximally entangled state between individual atoms held in spatially separate cavities. Under ideal conditions, the scheme is deterministic. In a realistic setting, when the the atom-cavity interaction may be weak, and the detectors are imperfect, we show that the scheme is robust against experimental inefficiencies and yields probabilistic entanglement of very high fidelity.