Comment on “Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage from an atomic to a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate”

Abstract

Collective two-color photoassociation of a freely interacting $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ Bose-Einstein condensate is theoretically examined, focusing on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) from an atomic to a stable molecular condensate. In particular, Drummond et al. [Phys. Rev. A. 65, 063619 (2002)] have predicted that particle-particle interactions can limit the efficiency of collective atom-molecule STIRAP, and that optimizing the laser parameters can partially overcome this limitation. We suggest that the molecular conversion efficiency can be further improved by treating the initial condensate density as an optimization parameter.