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Physical Review A

Simple and robust extension of the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage technique to N -level systems

Vladimir S. Malinovsky, David J. Tannor

Published Dec 1, 1997• 165 citations

Abstract

STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) has proven to be an efficient and robust technique for transferring population in a three-level system without populating the intermediate state. Here we show that the counterintuitive pulse sequence in STIRAP, in which the Stokes pulse precedes the pump, emerges automatically from a variant of optimal control theory we have previously called ``local'' optimization. Since local optimization is a well-defined, automated computational procedure, this opens the door to automated computation of generalized STIRAP schemes in arbitrarily complicated $N$-level coupling situations. If the coupling is sequential, a simple qualitative extension of STIRAP emerges: the Stokes pulse precedes the pump as in the three-level system. But, in addition, spanning both the Stokes and pump pulses are pulses corresponding to the transitions between the $N\ensuremath{-}2$ intermediate states with intensities about an order of magnitude greater than those of the Stokes and pump pulses. This scheme is amazingly robust, leading to almost 100% population transfer with significantly less population transfer to the $N\ensuremath{-}2$ intermediate states than in previously proposed extensions of STIRAP.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.56.4929

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The Journal of Chemical Physics•Mar 1, 1992•126 citations

STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) has proven to be an efficient and robust technique for transferring population in a three-level system without populating the intermediate state. Here we show that the counterintuitive pulse sequence in STIRAP, in which the Stokes pulse precedes the pump, emerges automatically from a variant of optimal control theory we have previously called ``local'' optimization. Since local optimization is a well-defined, automated computational procedure, this opens the door to automated computation of generalized STIRAP schemes in arbitrarily complicated

N

-level coupling situations. If the coupling is sequential, a simple qualitative extension of STIRAP emerges: the Stokes pulse precedes the pump as in the three-level system. But, in addition, spanning both the Stokes and pump pulses are pulses corresponding to the transitions between the

N\ensuremath{-}2

intermediate states with intensities about an order of magnitude greater than those of the Stokes and pump pulses. This scheme is amazingly robust, leading to almost 100% population transfer with significantly less population transfer to the

N\ensuremath{-}2

intermediate states than in previously proposed extensions of STIRAP.

The technique of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is an efficient and robust technique for population transfer in three-state chain-wise connected quantum systems, 1-2-3. Here we analyze the transition time in STIRAP, that is the time it takes for the population to be transferred from state 1 to state 3. We derive a very simple formula for this transition time, which shows that it is inversely proportional to the nonadiabatic coupling $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\vartheta}\ifmmode \dot{}\else \.{}\fi{}}({t}_{c})$, estimated at the time

{t}_{c}

when the pump and Stokes couplings have the same value. Explicit formulas for several pulse shapes of the pump and Stokes fields are derived. Contrary to the naive expectation that the transition time might be proportional to the delay between the pump and Stokes pulses, or to the width of their overlap region, we find that the transition time is inversely proportional to the delay, i.e., larger delays produce faster transitions. We also calculate the transition time in two important variations of the STIRAP technique---bright-STIRAP and STIRAP in multistate systems---where similar features are found.

Abstract We consider coherent population transfer in multilevel quantum systems driven by time-delayed pulse trains. We show how to choose the parameters of the trains so that the population dynamics tracks the behavior of a Λ-type three-level system under stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP). Efficient population transfer can be achieved regardless of the order and with or without overlap of the pump and the Stokes sub-pulses of the trains. Generalized STIRAP schemes of population transfer in N -level system with sequential couplings are also examined. The mechanism of the population transfer and the robustness of the proposed schemes are discussed.

It introduced several methods to transfer population,including two-level system and three-level system, and gave some comparisons on transfer efficiency and transfer velocity of them in theory. It is shown that population transfer by coherent pulse sequence is better than incoherence one. Numerical simulation results showed that when using Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Rapid Passage (STIRAP), in which the pump laser pulse fully overlaps the Stokes pulse with the Stokes preceding the pump, population can be transferred completely and rapidly. Robust control of population transfer among Zeeman sublevels in the ground states of three-level system is investigated using adiabatic rapid passage in theory. The laser pulse widths are supposed to be short compared to the lifetime of the excited level, which means adiabatic. We demonstrated that techniques of STIRAP can be found to optimize population transfer in the ground states of three-level Λ system.

We demonstrate that Optimal Control Theory (OCT) with a state-dependent constraint which depends on the state of the system at each instant can reproduce the famous counterintuitive mechanism of Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP). We examine this behavior in a Λ-type three-level system and we show that could be applied for sequentially coupled many-level systems. We study the robustness of the two methods with respect to pulse fluctuations and the decays. We show that new OCT formulation appears to be more robust than STIRAP when a perturbation is introduced in the pulses. Such method is of great use for systems involving coherence loss such as molecular systems with dissociation or ionization limits. It also may find potential applications in the control of chemical reactions, quantum optics, and quantum information processing.

Population transfer in a three-level A system is simulated numerically and optimized. Almost complete population transfer from |1) to |3) is achieved by a genetic algorithm while the population in state |2) reached minimum over the entire evolution at the same time. The result shows that the optimal pulse sequence is the well-known stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) scheme. The detuning of pump pulse and Stokes pulse Δp and Δs with the opposite sign and the chirps χp and χs with the same sign are in favour of the complete and robust population transfer for few-cycle laser pulse. Rabi frequencies Ωp and Ωs have insensitive effects on the complete population transfer during a large scope of their ratio when they are large enough.

Stimulated Raman scattering involving adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a proven technique for population transfer in three-level systems with strong oscillator strengths. We show that the STIRAP process should also yield high transfer efficiencies when the densities of states near the intermediate and final levels are high, provided certain criteria for the experimentally controllable parameters are met. We also show that high transfer efficiencies may even be possible when the pump and Stokes lasers can access levels outside of the three-level system. The criteria are derived with an approach that emphasizes the adiabatic nature of the transfer process in an eigenvector of the interaction Hamiltonian that resembles a trapped state. The results are compared to density matrix calculations.