Establishing multi-party entanglement with entangled photons

Multi-party quantum communication protocols usually assume that the parties involved share entangled states comprising many qubits. Tills is in stark contrast to present day reality. where even the generation of a GHZ state is a cumbersome procedure. We here present a cavity QED based implementation of atl in principle rather general scheme that would allow the tailorable creation of high order entangled states. The qubits in our scheme are one-photon wavepackets that can easily be distributed over a network. As the polarisation states of subsequently generated photons are entangled our proposed source could be used to establish entanglement between different nodes of a quantum network. The scheme is limited by technical imperfections but reliable generation of up to 10 entangled qubits seems possible with present dal experimental capabilities.