Physical Review A
Complete adiabatic passage to arbitrarily sculpted superposition states
Petr Král, Moshe Shapiro
Abstract
We introduce the ``shaped-adiabatic-passage'' method that allows one to realize a complete population transfer from a given state $|1〉$ to superpositions of energy eigenstates $|\ensuremath{\Psi}〉={\ensuremath{\sum}}_{k}{c}_{k}{e}^{\ensuremath{-}i{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{k}t}|k〉$ of any desired composition. This objective can be achieved by using a ``shaped'' (dump or Stokes) laser pulse, formed by simultaneous monochromatic pulses of the same smooth profile, resonantly coupling the states $|k〉$ with a single intermediate state $|2〉,$ followed by a (pump or anti-Stokes) pulse, coupling this intermediate state with the initial state $|1〉.$ The pulse shapes can be obtained from first-order perturbation theory, so the method can be used for efficient information coding in the form of superpositions of atomic Rydberg states or of molecular vibrational states.