  We present a scheme for generating robust and persistent entanglement between
qubits that do not interact and that are separated by a long and lossy
transmission channel, using Markovian reservoir engineering. The proposal uses
only the correlated decay into the common channel of remotely separated, driven
single-photon qubit transitions. This simple scheme is generic and applicable
to various experimental implementations, including circuit and cavity QED, with
little experimental overhead compared with methods requiring dynamic control,
initialization, measurement, or feedback. In addition to avoiding these
inefficiencies, the simple protocol is highly robust against noise,
miscalibration, and loss in the channel. We find high quality solutions over a
wide range of parameters and show that the optimal strategy reflects a
transition from ballistic to diffusive photon transmission, going from
symmetrically and coherently driving a common steady state to asymmetrically
absorbing photons that are emitted from one qubit by the second. Detailed
analysis of the role of the transmission channel shows that allowing
bi-directional decay drastically increases indistinguishability and thereby
quadratically suppresses infidelity.
