Generation of distributed entangled coherent states over a lossy environment with inefficient detectors

Entangled coherent states are useful for various applications in quantum information processing but they are are sensitive to loss. We propose a scheme to generate distributed entangled coherent states over a lossy environment in such a way that the fidelity is independent of the losses at detectors heralding the generation of the entanglement. We compare our scheme with a previous one for the same purpose \[Ourjoumtsev {\em et al.}, Nat. Phys. {\bf 5} 189 (2009)\] and find parameters for which our new scheme results in superior performance.