Dissipation-induced geometric phase for an atom in cavity QED

We present a feasible scheme to investigate the geometric phase for an atom trapped in an optical cavity induced by the effective decay process due to cavity photon loss. The cavity mode, together with the external driving fields, acts as the engineered environment of the atom. When the parameters of the reservoir is adiabatically and cyclically changed, the system initially in the nontrivial dark state of the effective Lindblad operator undergoes a cyclic evolution and acquires a geometric phase. The geometric phase can be observed with the atomic Ramsey interference oscillation in the decoherence-free subspace.