Nonadiabaticity in stimulated Raman adiabatic passage

Yuan Sun and Harold Metcalf
Phys. Rev. A 90, 033408 – Published 10 September 2014

Abstract

This paper begins with the premise that stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) from one state to another by coupling to an intermediate state necessarily requires some population of that intermediate state. The usual view of the process depends on having no population in the intermediate state, but a simple argument from the time-dependent Schrödinger equation shows that such adiabatic transfer cannot occur. From another perspective, removing the time dependence of the Hamiltonian by making the rotating frame transformation cancels the optical frequency oscillations but does not account for the envelopes of the pulses commonly used for STIRAP. By assuming a small but finite intermediate state amplitude ɛ1 in the wave function, the propagator for the evolution between initial and final states is derived. Applying the propagator to the initial state produces a single compact formula for the final intermediate-state population that is readily evaluated for an arbitrary choice of laser pulse parameters. Several plots for various experimental conditions show that under the conditions normally used for STIRAP experiments the effects are typically a few percent or less, but in the end this effect puts an ultimate limit on total efficiency.

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  • Received 6 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.90.033408

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Yuan Sun and Harold Metcalf

  • Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794-3800, USA

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Issue

Vol. 90, Iss. 3 — September 2014

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