  Heralded entanglement between collective excitations in two atomic ensembles
is probabilistically generated, stored, and converted to single photon fields.
By way of the concurrence, quantitative characterizations are reported for the
scaling behavior of entanglement with excitation probability and for the
temporal dynamics of various correlations resulting in the decay of
entanglement. A lower bound of the concurrence for the collective atomic state
of 0.9\pm 0.3 is inferred. The decay of entanglement as a function of storage
time is also observed, and related to the local dynamics.
