STIRAP schemes for atomic Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

In coherent control of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) the major limitation to successful high fidelity transfer using optical Raman transitions is spontaneous emission of radiation and the decoherence that this causes. We present a scheme based on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) designed specifically for Rubidium 87. STIRAP is a method of population transfer that relies on the adiabatic theorem of quantum mechanics. Instead of transferring population between Hamiltonian ground states, one adiabatically evolves the ground states into some desired superposition. We show that one may thereby implement arbitrary rotations of spinor BECs with extremely high fidelities. Our simulations show that given a BEC with N = 104 atoms, we may do an arbitrary unitary rotation with an infidelity of about 10-7 that takes approximately 100 ns.