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Advances in Optics and Photonics

Picturing stimulated Raman adiabatic passage: a STIRAP tutorial

Bruce W. Shore

Published Sep 26, 2017• 86 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The procedure of stimulated-Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), one of many well-established techniques for quantum-state manipulation, finds widespread application in chemistry, physics, and information processing. Numerous reviews discuss these applications, the history of its development, and some of the underlying physics. This tutorial supplies material useful as background for the STIRAP reviews as well as related techniques for adiabatic manipulation of quantum structures, with emphasis on the theory and simulation rather than on experimental results. It particularly emphasizes the picturing of behavior in various abstract vector spaces, wherein torque equations offer intuition about adiabatic changes. Appendices provide brief explanations of related coherent-excitation topics and useful evaluations of relative strengths of coherent transitions—the Rabi frequencies—involving Zeeman sublevels.

DOI
10.1364/aop.9.000563

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The procedure of stimulated-Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), one of many well-established techniques for quantum-state manipulation, finds widespread application in chemistry, physics, and information processing. Numerous reviews discuss these applications, the history of its development, and some of the underlying physics. This tutorial supplies material useful as background for the STIRAP reviews as well as related techniques for adiabatic manipulation of quantum structures, with emphasis on the theory and simulation rather than on experimental results. It particularly emphasizes the picturing of behavior in various abstract vector spaces, wherein torque equations offer intuition about adiabatic changes. Appendices provide brief explanations of related coherent-excitation topics and useful evaluations of relative strengths of coherent transitions—the Rabi frequencies—involving Zeeman sublevels.
The first presentation of the STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) technique with proper theoretical foundation and convincing experimental data appeared 25 years ago, in the May 1st, 1990 issue of The Journal of Chemical Physics. By now, the STIRAP concept has been successfully applied in many different fields of physics, chemistry, and beyond. In this article, we comment briefly on the initial motivation of the work, namely, the study of reaction dynamics of vibrationally excited small molecules, and how this initial idea led to the documented success. We proceed by providing a brief discussion of the physics of STIRAP and how the method was developed over the years, before discussing a few examples from the amazingly wide range of applications which STIRAP now enjoys, with the aim to stimulate further use of the concept. Finally, we mention some promising future directions.
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a widely-used technique of coherent state-to-state manipulation for many applications in physics, chemistry, and beyond. The adiabatic evolution of the state involved in STIRAP, called adiabatic passage, guarantees its robustness against control errors, but also leads to problems of low efficiency and decoherence. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate an alternative approach, termed stimulated Raman "user-defined" passage (STIRUP), where a parameterized state is employed for constructing desired evolutions to replace the adiabatic passage in STIRAP. The user-defined passages can be flexibly designed for optimizing different objectives for different tasks, e.g. minimizing leakage error. To experimentally benchmark its performance, we apply STIRUP to the task of coherent state transfer in a superconducting Xmon qutrit. We found that STIRUP completed the transfer more then four times faster than STIRAP with enhanced robustness, and achieved a fidelity of 99.5%, which is the highest among all recent experiments based on STIRAP and its variants. In practice, STIRUP differs from STIRAP only in the design of driving pulses; therefore, most existing applications of STIRAP can be readily implemented with STIRUP.
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a well-established technique for producing coherent population transfer in a three-state quantum system. We here exploit the resemblance between the Schrödinger equation for such a quantum system and the Newton equation of motion for a classical system undergoing torque to discuss several classical analogues of STIRAP, notably the motion of a moving charged particle subject to the Lorentz force of a quasistatic magnetic field, the orientation of a magnetic moment in a slowly varying magnetic field and the Coriolis effect. Like STIRAP, these phenomena occur for counterintuitive motion of the torque and are robustly insensitive to small changes in the interaction properties.
Abstract STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) is a powerful laser-based method, usually involving two photons, for efficient and selective transfer of populations between quantum states. A particularly interesting feature is the fact that the coupling between the initial and the final quantum states is via an intermediate state, even though the lifetime of the latter can be much shorter than the interaction time with the laser radiation. Nevertheless, spontaneous emission from the intermediate state is prevented by quantum interference. Maintaining the coherence between the initial and final state throughout the transfer process is crucial. STIRAP was initially developed with applications in chemical dynamics in mind. That is why the original paper of 1990 was published in The Journal of Chemical Physics . However, from about the year 2000, the unique capabilities of STIRAP and its robustness with respect to small variations in some experimental parameters stimulated many researchers to apply the scheme to a variety of other fields of physics. The successes of these efforts are documented in this collection of articles. In Part A the experimental success of STIRAP in manipulating or controlling molecules, photons, ions or even quantum systems in a solid-state environment is documented. After a brief introduction to the basic physics of STIRAP, the central role of the method in the formation of ultracold molecules is discussed, followed by a presentation of how precision experiments (measurement of the upper limit of the electric dipole moment of the electron or detecting the consequences of parity violation in chiral molecules) or chemical dynamics studies at ultralow temperatures benefit from STIRAP. Next comes the STIRAP-based control of photons in cavities followed by a group of three contributions which highlight the potential of the STIRAP concept in classical physics by presenting data on the transfer of waves (photonic, magnonic and phononic) between respective waveguides. The works on ions or ion strings discuss options for applications, e.g. in quantum information. Finally, the success of STIRAP in the controlled manipulation of quantum states in solid-state systems, which are usually hostile towards coherent processes, is presented, dealing with data storage in rare-earth ion doped crystals and in nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers or even in superconducting quantum circuits. The works on ions and those involving solid-state systems emphasize the relevance of the results for quantum information protocols. Part B deals with theoretical work, including further concepts relevant to quantum information or invoking STIRAP for the manipulation of matter waves. The subsequent articles discuss the experiments underway to demonstrate the potential of STIRAP for populating otherwise inaccessible high-lying Rydberg states of molecules, or controlling and cooling the translational motion of particles in a molecular beam or the polarization of angular-momentum states. The series of articles concludes with a more speculative application of STIRAP in nuclear physics, which, if suitable radiation fields become available, could lead to spectacular results.
The stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) shows an efficient technique that accurately transfers population between two discrete quantum states with the same parity, in three-level quantum systems based on adiabatic evolution. This technique has widely theoretical and experimental applications in many fields of physics, chemistry, and beyond. Here, we present a generally robust approach to speed up STIRAP with invariant-based shortcut to adiabaticity. By controlling the dynamical process, we inversely design a family of Hamiltonians that can realize fast and accurate population transfer from the first to the third level, while the systematic error is largely suppressed in general. Furthermore, a detailed trade-off relation between the population of the intermediate state and the amplitudes of Rabi frequencies in the transfer process is illustrated. These results provide an optimal route toward manipulating the evolution of three-level quantum systems in future quantum information processing.