Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a multi-level atom

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive formalism for stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in multi-level atoms, accommodating complex state degeneracies and couplings, with applications demonstrated on toy models and Cesium atoms.

Contribution

It introduces a general theoretical framework for STIRAP in multi-level systems, extending previous models to arbitrary degeneracies and couplings.

Findings

Formalism applicable to systems with arbitrary degenerate states

Successfully applied to toy models and Cesium atom

Provides complete description of adiabatic passage process

Abstract

We present a general formalism for describing stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a multi-level atom. The atom is assumed to have two ground state manifolds a and b and an excited state manifold e, and the adiabatic passage is carried out by resonantly driving the a-e and b-e transitions with time-dependent fields. Our formalism gives a complete description of the adiabatic passage process, and can be applied to systems with arbitrary numbers of degenerate states in each manifold and arbitrary couplings of the a-e and b-e transitions. We illustrate the formalism by applying it to both a simple toy model and to adiabatic passage in the Cesium atom.