Entanglement in a system of two dipole-interacting atoms

We investigate how efficiently two identical two-level atoms can be entangled by resonant dipole-dipole interaction and laser field. The entanglement is achieved by driving the system with a carefully designed laser pulse that transfers the system's population to one of the maximally entangled Dicke states in a way somewhat analogous to population inversion by a resonant frequency, power and duration, the fidelity of generating a maximally entangled state approaches unity as the distance between the atoms goes to zero. We also calculate the Bell inequality violation for the case and propose an experimental scheme for its measurement