Perspective: Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage: The status after 25 years

Abstract

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.

Efficient production of long-lived ultracold Sr2 molecules

“…More recently, two-photon coherent transfer of cold Rb atom pairs into ground-state Rb 2 molecules was demonstrated using a frequency-chirped laser pulse [12]. The coherent population transfer of [10] was stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), which evolves a dark state from a pair of * Sr2molecules@strontiumBEC.com atoms into a molecule [13,14]. Unfortunately, because of losses by non-adiabatic coupling and short lifetime of the molecules, the molecule association efficiency was only 30%, far below the efficiency potentially achievable by STIRAP.…”

Coherent manipulation of noise-protected superconducting artificial atoms in the Lambda scheme

“…For the example shown, frequency fluctuations of the microwave fields 1 MHz still guarantee 95 % efficiency. This important result would be hardly attainable for natural atoms driven at optical frequencies [27,[41][42][43], where the available phase control is limited. In addition phase modulated 2+1 STIRAP is naturally resilient to non-Markovian noise inducing slow fluctuations [39] of the energy splittings.…”

“…In the early proposal of "2+1" Λ−STIRAP, lack of efficiency due to the stray dynamical Stark-shift was cured by using fields with a small static two-photon detuning [41][42][43], but unfortunately the resulting protocol was not robust [27]. Instead our control scheme is tailored to guarantee the same robustness of conventional STIRAP.…”

“…Indeed adiabatic evolution may be used to trigger twophoton absorption-emission pumping cycles, which allow for on demand manipulation of individual photons in distributed quantum networks, as proposed in the cavity-QED realm [26,27]. Demonstrating control by a Λ configuration in last-generation AAs would extend this scenario to the microwave arena, opening the perspective of performing demanding protocols in highly integrated solid-state quantum architectures [13,14], which are usually subject to specific design constraints [28].…”

“…allowing efficient coupling at symmetry, where decoherence times are large, we first replace the direct pump pulse by a two-photon process, which yields overall the "2+1" Λ scheme [see Fig.1(a)]. This configuration is however known to lack robustness against fluctuations of the parameters [27,[41][42][43]. To overcome this problem we supplement the "2+1" Λ scheme by suitable advanced control, which turns out to be the key ingredient for achieving both ∼ 100% population transfer efficiency and robustness.…”