The iconic Schr\"odinger's cat state describes a system that may be in a
superposition of two macroscopically distinct states, for example two clearly
separated oscillator coherent states. Quite apart from their role in
understanding the quantum classical boundary, such states have been suggested
as offering a quantum advantage for quantum metrology, quantum communication
and quantum computation. As is well known these applications have to face the
difficulty that the irreversible interaction with an environment causes the
superposition to rapidly evolve to a mixture of the component states in the
case that the environment is not monitored. Here we show that by engineering
the interaction with the environment there exists a large class of systems that
can evolve irreversibly to a cat state. To be precise we show that it is
possible to engineer an irreversible process so that the steady state is close
to a pure Schr\"odinger's cat state by using double well systems and an
environment comprising two-photon (or phonon) absorbers. We also show that it
should be possible to prolong the lifetime of a Schr\"odinger's cat state
exposed to the destructive effects of a conventional single-photon decohering
environment. Our protocol should make it easier to prepare and maintain
Schr\"odinger cat states which would be useful in applications of quantum
metrology and information processing as well as being of interest to those
probing the quantum to classical transition.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures. Significantly updated version with supplementary
informatio