Collective Chirped STIRAP in a Pair of Three-Level Atoms: Dressed-Manifold Dynamics and Compensation of the Rydberg-Rydberg Interaction-Induced Detuning
Vladimir V. Malinovsky, Svetlana A. Malinovskaya
quant-phSubmitted Sep 19, 2026• Announced Sep 22, 2026• 0 citations
We investigate collective chirped stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in a pair of identical three-level atoms using a symmetric six-state model. Numerical simulations reveal a pronounced oscillatory dependence of the population transfer to the doubly excited Rydberg state on the peak Rabi frequency, indicating dynamics beyond the conventional single-dark-state description of STIRAP. To identify the underlying mechanism, we develop a dressed-manifold description based on gauge-invariant projections onto nearly degenerate instantaneous dressed manifolds. The analysis demonstrates that the wavefunction remains predominantly confined to a two-dimensional dark manifold while becoming transiently coupled to a neighboring bright manifold during the pulse-overlap interval. We further show that in the dressed-manifold representation, the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction modifies the collective resonance structure while preserving the dark-bright manifold dynamics responsible for the oscillatory transfer; an appropriately chosen frequency chirp compensates the interaction-induced detuning and restores efficient population transfer. This dressed-manifold picture provides a consistent interpretation of oscillatory collective transfer and establishes a framework for controlling adiabatic dynamics in interacting multilevel systems by linearly chirped STIRAP, opening a route toward manifold-based control of Rydberg-mediated quantum gates, correlated-state preparation, and other coherent operations in interacting atomic systems.
We investigate collective chirped stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in a pair of identical three-level atoms using a symmetric six-state model. Numerical simulations reveal a pronounced oscillatory dependence of the population transfer to the doubly excited Rydberg state on the peak Rabi frequency, indicating dynamics beyond the conventional single-dark-state description of STIRAP. To identify the underlying mechanism, we develop a dressed-manifold description based on gauge-invariant projections onto nearly degenerate instantaneous dressed manifolds. The analysis demonstrates that the wavefunction remains predominantly confined to a two-dimensional dark manifold while becoming transiently coupled to a neighboring bright manifold during the pulse-overlap interval. We further show that in the dressed-manifold representation, the Rydberg-Rydberg interaction modifies the collective resonance structure while preserving the dark-bright manifold dynamics responsible for the oscillatory transfer; an appropriately chosen frequency chirp compensates the interaction-induced detuning and restores efficient population transfer. This dressed-manifold picture provides a consistent interpretation of oscillatory collective transfer and establishes a framework for controlling adiabatic dynamics in interacting multilevel systems by linearly chirped STIRAP, opening a route toward manifold-based control of Rydberg-mediated quantum gates, correlated-state preparation, and other coherent operations in interacting atomic systems.
In this paper we propose a protocol to achieve coherent population transfer between two states in a three-level atom by using two ac fields. It is based on the physics of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), but it is implemented with the constraint of a reduced control, namely, one of the fields cannot be switched off. A combination of frequency chirps is used with resonant fields, allowing us to achieve approximate destructive interference, despite the fact that an exact dark state does not exist. This chirped STIRAP protocol is tailored for applications to artificial atoms, where architectures with several elementary units can be strongly coupled but where the possibility of switching on and off such couplings is often very limited. Demonstration of this protocol would be a benchmark for the implementation of a class of multilevel advanced control procedures for quantum computation and microwave quantum photonics in artificial atoms.
Coherent stimulated Raman adiabatic passages (STIRAP) based on a dark state have many applications in diverse quantum systems. In the case of large single-photon detuning in three-level $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ systems, one of the bright states almost does not involve the excited state and then acts as the dark state. In this paper, we report the experimental observation of STIRAP based on the dark state, as well as b-STIRAP based on the above bright state, with the same transfer efficiency in a three-level $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ cold atomic ensemble. Moreover, both STIRAP and b-STIRAP are found to be immune to the time-varying ac Stark shift. As for a typical example to manipulate a superposition state, we realize an inverse operation on an initial superposition state, which cannot be achieved efficiently for STIRAP based on only the dark state. Our observed double STIRAP thus provides a feasible and robust manner to manipulate quantum states.
The strong dipole-dipole interaction of trapped Rydberg ions offers the possibility of sub-microsecond entanglement gates. For example a two-qubit Control-Phase gate in 88 Sr + ions can be realized, by simultaneous excitation to the Rydberg states via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) with simultaneous microwave induced dipole-dipole interaction. We show that this excitation protocol distorts the dark-state of the STIRAP stage and is prone to decay from the intermediate state. Here, we propose a novel pulse ordering, in which the STIRAP and the microwave dressing of the Rydberg states occurs in separate stages, preventing mutual interference effects that are detrimental to the gate fidelity. We show that, for experimentally feasible parameters, the proposed excitation scheme can achieve a fidelity of 99.93%, surpassing the experimentally demonstrated gate. In addition, we demonstrate a non-adiabatic speed-up to 400 ns by employing asymmetric pulse shapes in the STIRAP stage. The entangling phase is then controlled solely through the interaction strength by nonresonant asymmetric chirping of the microwave field.
We propose a pulse-shaping method for improving population transfer in multistate stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) with nearest-neighbour couplings only. The method extends the quasiparallel-eigenenergy approach, previously used for two- and three-state systems, to multistate chains without introducing additional shortcut fields. The pump and Stokes fields are shaped so that the eigenenergies closest to the dark state remain nearly parallel to it during the central part of the interaction, where nonadiabatic transitions are most likely to occur. We derive analytic prescriptions for the required pulse shapes and apply them to five-, seven-, and nine-state chains formed by magnetic sublevels of degenerate manifolds with angular momenta Jg→Je=Jg and Jg→Je=Jg−1 driven by a pair of right- and left-circularly polarized pulses. Numerical simulations show that the optimized pulses can reduce the population transfer error by several orders of magnitude compared to standard Gaussian pulses. The same shapes also improve robustness against variations of the peak Rabi frequency, the single-photon detuning, and the multiphoton detuning. The comparison between the two angular-momentum families shows that the Jg→Jg chains are generally more favourable, because their Clebsch-Gordan coefficients keep the relevant bright-state gap larger in the region where the dark state changes most rapidly. Finally, simulations with spontaneous emission show that the optimized resonant pulses remain advantageous in the lossy regime as well.
The stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) shows an efficient technique that accurately transfers population between two discrete quantum states with the same parity, in three-level quantum systems based on adiabatic evolution. This technique has widely theoretical and experimental applications in many fields of physics, chemistry, and beyond. Here, we present a generally robust approach to speed up STIRAP with invariant-based shortcut to adiabaticity. By controlling the dynamical process, we inversely design a family of Hamiltonians that can realize fast and accurate population transfer from the first to the third level, while the systematic error is largely suppressed in general. Furthermore, a detailed trade-off relation between the population of the intermediate state and the amplitudes of Rabi frequencies in the transfer process is illustrated. These results provide an optimal route toward manipulating the evolution of three-level quantum systems in future quantum information processing.
We investigate the coherent population transfer and associated effects for a three level atomic system, with the third level being a Rydberg state. The scheme adopted here is the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP). An atomic beam of metastable helium is orthogonally crossing two laser beams in a tunable dc electric field. The ir laser of 790 - 830 nm connects the triplet 3P state to the Rydberg states (n = 12 - 50) and the uv laser of 389 nm connects the metastable triplet 2S state to the triplet 3P state. A third laser of 1083 nm driving 2S-2P transition is applied downstream, providing a strong bichromatic force on the atoms remaining in the 2S state to deflect them, establishing the absolute count of Rydberg atoms. Rydberg atoms can be ionized by background thermal radiations at room temperature and it is observed in this experiment. This fact actually enables precise measurement, especially spectroscopy, of Rydberg atoms by simply looking at the ions, which are easy to detect. It is also confirmed that background thermal radiation could significantly redistribute the population between neighboring Rydberg states. The 2S, 3P and the final Rydberg states all have magnetic sub-levels, hence the linkage pattern of the excitation has non-trivial crossings, if the polarizations of the two lasers are not parallel to each other. Those phase differences in different excitation paths induced by the laser polarizations can lead to interference which would determine the excitation probability and the polarization of the excited atom. Theoretical calculations predict interesting interference patterns as a function of laser polarizations and Rabi frequencies. Those interference structures have been experimentally observed. Transverse velocity distribution in the atomic beam turns out to be a limiting factor in the efficiency of production of Rydberg atoms. The transverse velocity of an atom can not only induce one-photon detuning but also two-photon detuning, which could effectively reduce the STIRAP process efficiency. By adding a laser to make Doppler molasses in the transverse direction, we can heat or cool the atomic beam transversely and verify this effect. | 190 pages