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Physical Review Letters

Experimental Demonstration of Selective Coherent Population Transfer via a Continuum

Thorsten Peters, Леонід Петрович Яценко, Thomas Halfmann

Published Sep 1, 2005• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the first experimental demonstration of coherent population transfer, induced by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage, via continuum states. Population is transferred from the metastable state 2s(1)S(0) to the excited state 4s(1)S(0) in helium atoms in a two-photon process mediated by coherent interaction with the ionization continuum. While incoherent techniques usually do not permit any population transfer in such a process, we show that stimulated Raman adiabatic passage allows significant population transfer to take place also via ultrafast decay channels.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.95.103601

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We propose a technique which produces nearly complete ionization of the population of a discrete state coupled to a continuum by a two-photon transition via a lossy intermediate state whose lifetime is much shorter than the interaction duration. We show that using counterintuitively ordered pulses, as in stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), wherein the pulse coupling the intermediate state to the continuum precedes and partly overlaps the pulse coupling the initial and intermediate states, greatly increases the ionization signal and strongly reduces the population loss due to spontaneous emission through the lossy state. For strong spontaneous emission from that state, however, the ionization is never complete because the dark state required for STIRAP does not exist. We demonstrate that this drawback can be eliminated almost completely by creating a laser-induced continuum structure (LICS) by embedding a third discrete state into the continuum with a third control laser. This LICS introduces some coherence into the continuum, which enables a STIRAP-like population transfer into the continuum. A highly accurate analytic description is developed and numerical results are presented for Gaussian pulse shapes.
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We report the experimental realization of coherent population transfer from the 23S2{}^{3}S23S state to 23P2{}^{3}P23P fine-structure levels of helium, using the technique of hyper-Raman adiabatic passage, in which the pump-laser coupling involves a two-photon transition. We discuss the dependence of population transfer upon pump and Stokes detunings, and show that by suitably setting the detunings one can transfer population efficiently as either a two-step process to final states or as a single-step two-photon transition to an intermediate state. We use an adiabatic-state picture to interpret these experimental results. Since the optimum detuning depends on the pump laser intensity the transfer efficiency is compromised by the variation of the intensity across the spatial profile of the laser beam. Our experimental data agree well with numerical simulation based on density-matrix equations, including all 15 magnetic sublevels.
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