Arbitrary atomic Bell states with two trapped ions are generated in a deterministic and preprogrammed way. The resulting entanglement is quantitatively analyzed using various measures of entanglement. For this, we reconstruct the density matrix using single qubit rotations and subsequent measurements with near-unity detection efficiency. This procedure represents the basic building block for future process tomography of quantum computations. As a first application, the temporal decay of entanglement is investigated in detail. We observe ultralong lifetimes for the Bell states ${\Psi }_{\pm }$, close to the fundamental limit set by the spontaneous emission from the metastable upper qubit level and longer than all reported values by 3 orders of magnitude.

• Received 28 July 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.220402