Entanglement and fluctuations in cavity quantum electrodynamics (Invited Paper)

We explore the entanglement between a single atom and a single, resonant field mode of a driven optical cavity, focusing on the strong driving regime. We show that, in the absence of spontaneous emission, there are special initial conditions that lead to approximately disentangled trajectories, whereas spontaneous emission results in coherent superpositions of such trajectories that may lead to (transient) near-maximally entangled atom-field states. We also discuss the possibility of using a special "asymmetric" field correlation function to track the time evolution of this entanglement.