The theory of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a three-level Lambda-scheme of the interaction of an atom or molecule with light, which takes the nonadiabatic processes at the beginning and the end of light pulses into account, is developed.
We propose a technique which produces nearly complete ionization of the population of a discrete state coupled to a continuum by a two-photon transition via a lossy intermediate state whose lifetime is much shorter than the interaction duration. We s
how that using counterintuitively ordered pulses, as in stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), wherein the pulse coupling the intermediate state to the continuum precedes and partly overlaps the pulse coupling the initial and intermediate states, greatly increases the ionization signal and strongly reduces the population loss due to spontaneous emission through the lossy state. For strong spontaneous emission from that state, however, the ionization is never complete because the dark state required for STIRAP does not exist. We demonstrate that this drawback can be eliminated almost completely by creating a laser-induced continuum structure (LICS) by embedding a third discrete state into the continuum with a third control laser. This LICS introduces some coherence into the continuum, which enables a STIRAP-like population transfer into the continuum. A highly accurate analytic description is developed and numerical results are presented for Gaussian pulse shapes.
We present a general formalism for describing stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a multi-level atom. The atom is assumed to have two ground state manifolds a and b and an excited state manifold e, and the adiabatic passage is carried out by resona
ntly driving the a-e and b-e transitions with time-dependent fields. Our formalism gives a complete description of the adiabatic passage process, and can be applied to systems with arbitrary numbers of degenerate states in each manifold and arbitrary couplings of the a-e and b-e transitions. We illustrate the formalism by applying it to both a simple toy model and to adiabatic passage in the Cesium atom.
We present an analytic description of the effects of dephasing processes on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a tripod quantum system. To this end, we develop an effective two-level model. Our analysis makes use of the adiabatic approximation in
the weak dephasing regime. An effective master equation for a two-level system formed by two dark states is derived, where analytic solutions are obtained by utilizing the Demkov-Kunike model. From these, it is found that the fidelity for the final coherent superposition state decreases exponentially for increasing dephasing rates. Depending on the pulse ordering and for adiabatic evolution the pulse delay can have an inverse effect.
We propose a method to improve the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) via dissipative quantum dynamics, taking into account the dephasing effects. Fast and robust population transfer can be obtained with the scheme by the designed pulses and
detuning, even though the initial state of the system is imperfect. With a concrete three-level system as an example, the influences of the imperfect initial state, variations in the control parameters, and various dissipation effects are discussed in detail. The numerical simulation shows that the scheme is insensitive to moderate fluctuations of experimental parameters and the relatively large dissipation effects of the excited state. Furthermore, the dominant dissipative factors, namely, the dephasing effects of the ground states and the imperfect initial state are no longer undesirable, in fact, they are the important resources to the scheme. Therefore, the scheme could provide more choices for the realization of the complete population transfer in the strong dissipative fields
We exploit a microscopically derived master equation for the study of STIRAP in the presence of decay from the auxiliary level toward the initial and final state, and compare our results with the predictions obtained from a phenomenological model pre
viously used [P. A. Ivanov, N. V. Vitanov, and K. Bergmann, Phys. Rev. A 72, 053412 (2005)]. It is shown that our approach predicts a much higher efficiency. The effects of temperature are also taken into account, proving that in b-STIRAP thermal pumping can increase the efficiency of the population transfer.