Breakdown of adiabatic transfer of light in waveguides in the presence of absorption

TL;DR

This paper investigates how small absorption in optical waveguides can cause a breakdown of adiabatic light transfer schemes like STIRAP, highlighting the sensitivity of such processes to decay effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that even minimal absorption can significantly disrupt adiabatic transfer in waveguides, providing analytical estimates for the threshold of breakdown.

Findings

Small decay causes significant dynamical changes.

Adiabatic transfer schemes break down at a sharp absorption threshold.

Analytical estimates can predict the absorption level causing failure.

Abstract

In atomic physics, adiabatic evolution is often used to achieve a robust and efficient population transfer. Many adiabatic schemes have also been implemented in optical waveguide structures. Recently there has been increasing interests in the influence of decay and absorption, and their engineering applications. Here it is shown that even a small decay can significantly influence the dynamical behaviour of a system, above and beyond a mere change of the overall norm. In particular, a small decay can lead to a breakdown of adiabatic transfer schemes, even when both the spectrum and the eigenfunctions are only sightly modified. This is demonstrated for the generalization of a STIRAP scheme that has recently been implemented in optical waveguide structures. Here the question how an additional absorption in either the initial or the target waveguide influences the transfer property of the scheme is addressed. It is found that the scheme breaks down for small values of the absorption at a relatively sharp threshold, which can be estimated by simple analytical arguments.