STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) has proven to be an efficient and robust technique for transferring population in a three-level system without populating the intermediate state. Here we show that the counterintuitive pulse sequence in STIRAP, in which the Stokes pulse precedes the pump, emerges automatically from a variant of optimal control theory we have previously called “local” optimization. Since local optimization is a well-defined, automated computational procedure, this opens the door to automated computation of generalized STIRAP schemes in arbitrarily complicated $N$-level coupling situations. If the coupling is sequential, a simple qualitative extension of STIRAP emerges: the Stokes pulse precedes the pump as in the three-level system. But, in addition, spanning both the Stokes and pump pulses are pulses corresponding to the transitions between the $N-2$ intermediate states with intensities about an order of magnitude greater than those of the Stokes and pump pulses. This scheme is amazingly robust, leading to almost 100% population transfer with significantly less population transfer to the $N-2$ intermediate states than in previously proposed extensions of STIRAP.

• Received 25 June 1997

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.56.4929