Physical Review A
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a two-state system
Nikolay V. Vitanov, Bruce W. Shore
Abstract
We present a method, using adiabatic passage, for creating a maximally coherent superposition in a two-state atom. The method exploits the analogy between the two-state Bloch equations and the three-state stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) equations, and uses two sequential but overlapping pulsed fields, a driving pump pulse and a delayed but overlapped detuning pulse. Like STIRAP, this method is robustly insensitive to small changes in pulse properties.