Physical Review A
Quantum control of multilevel atoms with rotational degeneracy using short laser pulses
G. Demeter
Abstract
We study the quantum control of multilevel atoms with rotationally degenerate levels using short laser pulses. Various control schemes are considered, ones using $\ensuremath{\pi}$ pulses, frequency-chirped pulses, two consecutive pulses, or two pulses that overlap each other partially. We study the possibilities of controlling the quantum state of an ensemble of atoms distributed randomly over one or more rotationally degenerate levels initially. For the sake of concreteness we use the hyperfine level scheme of the $^{85}\mathrm{Rb}$ $D$ line, but the results can easily be generalized for any of the alkali-metal atoms used in cooling and trapping experiments. We find that even though a number of difficulties arise, such as unequal coupling constants between rotational sublevels or dephasing between different hyperfine levels during the interaction, control schemes using simple or multiphoton adiabatic passage can be used to control the internal states of the atoms effectively as well as the center-of-mass motion. Furthermore, it is shown that in some cases it is possible to exploit the inequality of the coupling constants to entangle the rotational substates with specific distinct translational quantum states and hence separate these substates in momentum space.