  The coherent manipulation of the atomic matter waves is of great interest
both in science and technology. In order to study how an atom optic device
alters the coherence of an atomic beam, we consider the quantum lens proposed
by Averbukh et al [1] to show the discrete nature of the electromagnetic field.
We extend the analysis of this quantum lens to the study of another essentially
quantum property present in the focusing process, i.e., the atom-field
entanglement, and show how the initial atomic coherence and purity are affected
by the entanglement. The dynamics of this process is obtained in closed form.
We calculate the beam quality factor and the trace of the square of the reduced
density matrix as a function of the average photon number in order to analyze
the coherence and purity of the atomic beam during the focusing process.
