We present a general and versatile technique of population transfer based on {\it parallel adiabatic passage} by femtosecond shaped pulses. Their amplitude and phase are specifically designed to optimize the adiabatic passage corresponding to parallel eigenvalues at all times. We show that this technique allows the robust adiabatic population transfer in a Raman system with the total pulse area as low as 3 $π$, corresponding to a fluence of one order of magnitude below the conventional stimulated Raman adiabatic passage process. This process of short duration, typically pico- and subpicosecond, is easily implementable with the modern pulse shaper technology and opens the possibility of ultrafast robust population transfer with interesting applications in quantum information processing.
The theory of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a three-level Lambda-scheme of the interaction of an atom or molecule with light, which takes the nonadiabatic processes at the beginning and the end of light pulses into account, is developed.
We describe analytically and numerically the process of population transfer by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage through a bright state when the pulses propagate in a medium. Limitations of the adiabaticity are analyzed and interpreted in terms of reshaping of the pulses. We find parameters for the pulses for which the population transfer is nearly complete over long distances.
We propose a scheme which can produce desired nonadiabatic passages for the stimulated Raman transition in three-level systems. The state transfer in the protocol is realized by following the evolution of the dynamical basis itself and no additional coupling field is required. We also investigate the interplay between the present nonadiabatic protocol and the shortcut to adiabaticity. By incorporating the latter technology, we show that alternative passages with less occupancy of the intermediate level could be designed.
We consider stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) processes in tripod systems and show how to generate purely geometric phase changes of the quantum states involved. The geometric phases are controlled by three laser fields where pulse shapes, relative field strength and phases can be controlled. We present a robust set of universal gates for quantum computing based on these geometric phases: a one-qubit phase gate, a Hadamard gate and a two-qubit phase gate.
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 simp…
We propose a non-Hermitian generalization of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), which allows one to increase speed and fidelity of the adiabatic passage. This is done by adding balanced imaginary (gain/loss) terms in the diagonal (bare energy) terms of the Hamiltonian and choosing them such that they cancel exactly the nonadiabatic couplings, providing in this way an effective shortcut to adiabaticity. Remarkably, for a STIRAP using delayed Gaussian-shaped pulses in the counter-intuitive scheme the imaginary terms of the Hamiltonian turn out to be time independent. A possible physica…
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a widely used protocol to realize high-fidelity and robust quantum control in various quantum systems. However, further application of this protocol in superconducting qubits is limited by population leakage caused by the only weak anharmonicity. Here we introduce an optimally controlled shortcut-to-adiabatic (STA) technique to speed up the STIRAP protocol in a superconducting qudit. By modifying the shapes of the STIRAP pulses, we experimentally realize a fast (32 ns) and high-fidelity quantum state transfer. In addition, we demonstrate that our …
We report on the experimental demonstration of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in a Tm$^{3+}$:YAG crystal. Tm$^{3+}$:YAG is a promising material for use in quantum information processing applications, but as yet there are few experimental investigations of coherent Raman processes in this material. We investigate the effect of inhomogeneous broadening and Rabi frequency on the transfer efficiency and the width of the two-photon spectrum. Simulations of the complete Tm$^{3+}$:YAG system are presented along with the corresponding experimental results.
We generate half-excited symmetric Dicke states of two and four ions. We use multi-level stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) whose intermediate states are phonon Fock states. This process corresponds to the spin squeezing operation and half-excited Dicke states are generated during multi-level STIRAP. This method does not require local access for each ion or the preparation of phonon Fock states. Furthermore, it is robust since it is an adiabatic process. We evaluate the Dicke state using a witness operator and determine the upper and lower bounds of the fidelity without using full qua…
Quantum control methods for three-level systems have become recently an important direction of research in quantum information science and technology. Here we present numerical simulations using realistic experimental parameters for quantum process tomography in STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) and saSTIRAP (superadiabatic STIRAP). Specifically, we identify a suitable basis in the operator space as the identity operator together with the 8 Gell-Mann operators, and we calculate the corresponding process matrices, which have $9\times 9=81$ elements. We discuss these results for the id…
We introduce a high-fidelity technique for coherent control of three-state quantum systems, which combines two popular control tools --- stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) and composite pulses. By using composite sequences of pairs of partly delayed pulses with appropriate phases the nonadiabatic transitions, which prevent STIRAP from reaching unit fidelity, can be canceled to an arbitrary order by destructive interference, and therefore the technique can be made arbitrarily accurate. The composite phases are given by simple analytic formulas, and they are universal for they do not de…
We demonstrate experimentally how the process of Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) can be utilized for efficient coherent internal state transfer in single trapped and laser-cooled $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions. The transfer from the D$_{3/2}$ to the D$_{5/2}$ state, is detected by a fluorescence measurement revealing the population not transfered to the D$_{5/2}$ state. A coherent population transfer efficiency at the level of 95 % in a setup allowing for the internal state detection of individual ions in a string has been obtained.
We apply the inverse geometric optimization technique to generate an optimal and robust stimulated Raman exact passage (STIREP) considering the loss of the upper state as a characterization parameter. Control fields temporal shapes that are optimal with respect to pulse area, energy, and duration, are found to form a simple sequence with a combination of intuitively (near the beginning and the end) and counter-intuitively ordered pulse pairs. The resulting dynamics produces a loss which is about a third of that of the non-robust optimal STIREP. Alternative optimal solutions featuring lower los…
We report on the first observation of stimulated Raman scattering from a Lambda-type three-level atom, where the stimulation is realized by the vacuum field of a high-finesse optical cavity. The scheme produces one intracavity photon by means of an adiabatic passage technique based on a counter-intuitive interaction sequence between pump laser and cavity field. This photon leaves the cavity through the less-reflecting mirror. The emission rate shows a characteristic dependence on the cavity and pump detuning, and the observed spectra have a sub-natural linewidth. The results are in excellent a…
We propose a simple technique for the generation of arbitrary-sized Dicke states in a chain of trapped ions. The method uses global addressing of the entire chain by two pairs of delayed but partially overlapping laser pulses to engineer a collective adiabatic passage along a multi-ion dark state. Our technique, which is a many-particle generalization of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), is decoherence-free with respect to spontaneous emission and robust against moderate fluctuations in the experimental parameters. Furthermore, because the process is very rapid, the effects of heati…
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), driven with pulses of optimum shape and delay has the potential of reaching fidelities high enough to make it suitable for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. The optimum pulse shapes are obtained upon reduction of STIRAP to effective two-state systems. We use the Dykhne-Davis-Pechukas (DDP) method to minimize nonadiabatic transitions and to maximize the fidelity of STIRAP. This results in a particular relation between the pulse shapes of the two fields driving the Raman process. The DDP-optimized version of STIRAP maintains its robustnes…
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a widely-used technique of coherent state-to-state manipulation for many applications in physics, chemistry, and beyond. The adiabatic evolution of the state involved in STIRAP, called adiabatic passage, guarantees its robustness against control errors, but also leads to problems of low efficiency and decoherence. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate an alternative approach, termed stimulated Raman "user-defined" passage (STIRUP), where a parameterized state is employed for constructing desired evolutions to replace the adiabatic passage…
We experimentally demonstrate composite stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (CSTIRAP), which combines the concepts of composite pulse sequences and adiabatic passage. The technique is applied for population transfer in a rare-earth doped solid. We compare the performance of CSTIRAP with conventional single and repeated STIRAP, either in the resonant or the highly detuned regime. In the latter case, CSTIRAP improves the peak transfer efficiency and robustness, boosting the transfer efficiency substantially compared to repeated STIRAP. We also propose and demonstrate a universal version of CSTIRA…
Efficient initialization and manipulation of quantum states is important for numerous applications and it usually requires the ability to perform high fidelity and robust swapping of the populations of quantum states. Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) has been known to perform efficient and robust inversion of the ground states populations of a three-level system. However, its performance is sensitive to the initial state of the system. In this contribution we demonstrate that a slight modification of STIRAP, where we introduce a non-zero single-photon detuning, allows for efficient …
Accurate control of a quantum system is a fundamental requirement in many areas of modern science ranging from quantum information processing to high-precision measurements. A significantly important goal in quantum control is to prepare a desired state as fast as possible with sufficiently high fidelity allowed by available resources and experimental constraints. Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a robust way to realize high-fidelity state transfer but it requires a sufficiently long operation time to satisfy the adiabatic criteria. We here theoretically propose and then experime…
We describe how stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) can be applied to create spectral holes in an inhomogeneously broadened system. Due to the robustness of STIRAP, our proposal guarantees high flexibility and accuracy and, at variance with traditional spectral hole burning techniques, it may require substantially less time resources since it does not rely upon the spontaneous decay of an intermediate excited state. We investigate the effects on the scheme of dephasing and dissipation as well as of unintentional driving of undesired transitions due to a finite splitting of the initial …
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage is a quantum protocol that can be used for robust state preparation in a three-level system. It has been commonly employed in quantum optics, but recently this technique has drawn attention also in circuit quantum electrodynamics. The protocol relies on two slowly varying drive pulses that couple the initial and the target state via an intermediate state, which remains unpopulated. Here we study the detrimental effect of the parasitic couplings of the drives into transitions other than those required by the protocol. The effect is most prominent in systems wi…
We consider the population transfer process in a Lambda-type atomic medium of unequal oscillator strengths by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage via bright-state (b-STIRAP) taking into account propagation effects. Using both analytic and numerical methods we show that the population transfer efficiency is sensitive to the ratio q_p/q_s of the transition oscillator strengths. We find that the case q_p>q_s is more detrimental for population transfer process as compared to the case where $q_p \leq q_s$. For this case it is possible to increase medium dimensions while permitting efficient populati…
We exploit a microscopically derived master equation for the study of STIRAP in the presence of decay from the auxiliary level toward the initial and final state, and compare our results with the predictions obtained from a phenomenological model previously used [P. A. Ivanov, N. V. Vitanov, and K. Bergmann, Phys. Rev. A 72, 053412 (2005)]. It is shown that our approach predicts a much higher efficiency. The effects of temperature are also taken into account, proving that in b-STIRAP thermal pumping can increase the efficiency of the population transfer.
We use optimal control theory to obtain shortcuts to adiabaticity which maximize population transfer in a three-level STIRAP system, for a given finite duration of the process and specified dissipation rate at the intermediate state. We fix the sum of the intensities of the pump and Stokes pulses and use the mixing angle as the sole control variable. We determine the optimal variation of this angle and reveal the role of singular arc in the optimal trajectory, in order to minimize the effect of dissipation.
A master equation approach to the study of environmental effects in the adiabatic population transfer in three-state systems is presented. A systematic comparison with the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian approach [N. V. Vitanov and S. Stenholm, Phys. Rev. A {\bf 56}, 1463 (1997)] shows that in the weak coupling limit the two treatments lead to essentially the same results. Instead, in the strong damping limit the predictions are quite different: in particular the counterintuitive sequences in the STIRAP scheme turn out to be much more efficient than expected before. This point is explained in terms …
The stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) shows an efficient technique that accurately transfers population between two discrete quantum states with the same parity, in three-level quantum systems based on adiabatic evolution. This technique has widely theoretical and experimental applications in many fields of physics, chemistry, and beyond. Here, we present a generally robust approach to speed up STIRAP with invariant-based shortcut to adiabaticity. By controlling the dynamical process, we inversely design a family of Hamiltonians that can realize fast and accurate population transfer …
We propose a method to improve the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) via dissipative quantum dynamics, taking into account the dephasing effects. Fast and robust population transfer can be obtained with the scheme by the designed pulses and detuning, even though the initial state of the system is imperfect. With a concrete three-level system as an example, the influences of the imperfect initial state, variations in the control parameters, and various dissipation effects are discussed in detail. The numerical simulation shows that the scheme is insensitive to moderate fluctuations of…
We propose a technique which produces nearly complete ionization of the population of a discrete state coupled to a continuum by a two-photon transition via a lossy intermediate state whose lifetime is much shorter than the interaction duration. We show that using counterintuitively ordered pulses, as in stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), wherein the pulse coupling the intermediate state to the continuum precedes and partly overlaps the pulse coupling the initial and intermediate states, greatly increases the ionization signal and strongly reduces the population loss due to spontaneo…
We propose schemes to prepare atomic entangled states in a bi-mode cavity via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) and fractional stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (f-STIRAP) tech- niques. According to the simulation results, our schemes keep the cavity modes almost unexcited and the atomic excited states are nearly unpopulated during the whole process. The simulation also shows that the error probability is very small.
We developed single-shot shaped pulses for ultra high fidelity (UH-fidelity) population transfer on a 3-level quantum system in lambda configuration. To ensure high fidelity, we use the Lewis-Riesenfeld (L-R) method to derive a family of solutions leading to an exact transfer, where the solutions follow a single dynamical mode of the L-R invariant. Among this family, we identify a tracking solution with a single parameter to control simultaneously the fidelity of the transfer, the population of the excited state, and robustness. We define a measure of the robustness of an UH-fidelity transfer …
The Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) procedure is a robust and complete population transfer method which have various application in chemistry and atomic physics. Here, we study the effects of one-photon detuning, transition time, pulse width, and pulse delay parameters on the population transfer via STIRAP and b-STIRAP techniques. Moreover, the impact of the field amplitude which decreases the population transfer has been analyzed and it is shown that in b-STIRAP, the robustness of the complete transition can be improved by decreasing the field amplitude in the single-photon resona…
The rapid experimental progress in the field of superconducting nanocircuits gives rise to an increasing quest for advanced quantum-control techniques for these macroscopically coherent systems. Here we demonstrate theoretically that stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) should be possible with the quantronium setup of a Cooper-pair box. The scheme appears to be robust against decoherence and should be realizable even with the existing technology. As an application we present a method to generate single-phonon states of a nanomechnical resonator by vacuum-stimulated adiabatic passage wit…
In this paper we evaluate the performance of two superadiabatic stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) protocols derived from Gaussian and sin-cos pulses, under dissipation and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise in the energy levels. We find that for small amplitudes of Stokes and pump pulses, the population transfer is mainly achieved directly through the counterdiabatic pulse, while for large amplitudes the conventional STIRAP path dominates. This kind of "hedging" leads to a remarkable robustness against dissipation in the lossy intermediate state. For small pulse amplitudes and increasing noise…
We propose the use of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) to offer a fast high fidelity method of performing SU(2) rotations on spinor Bose Einstein condensates (BEC). Past demonstrations of BEC optical control suffer from difficulties arising from collective enhancement of spontaneous emission and inefficient two-photon transitions originating from selection rules. We present here a novel scheme which allows for arbitrary coherent rotations of two-component BECs while overcoming these issues. Numerical tests of the method show that for BECs of \ce{^{87}Rb} with up to $ 10^4 $ atoms an…
We present an analytic description of the effects of dephasing processes on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a tripod quantum system. To this end, we develop an effective two-level model. Our analysis makes use of the adiabatic approximation in the weak dephasing regime. An effective master equation for a two-level system formed by two dark states is derived, where analytic solutions are obtained by utilizing the Demkov-Kunike model. From these, it is found that the fidelity for the final coherent superposition state decreases exponentially for increasing dephasing rates. Depending on the…
We consider a method of sub-wavelength superlocalization and patterning of atomic matter waves via a two dimensional stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (2D STIRAP) process. An atom initially prepared in its ground level interacts with a doughnut-shaped optical vortex pump beam and a traveling wave Stokes laser beam with a constant (top-hat) intensity profile in space. The beams are sent in a counter-intuitive temporal sequence, in which the Stokes pulse precedes the pump pulse. The atoms interacting with both the traveling wave and the vortex beam are transferred to a final state through the 2…
We propose an alternative scheme to implement the quantum state transfer between two three-level atoms based on the invariant-based inverse engineering in cavity quantum electronic dynamics (QED) system. The quantum information can be ultrafast transferred between the atoms by taking advantage of the cavity field as a medium for exchanging quantum information speedily. Through designing the time-dependent laser pulse and atom-cavity coupling, we send the atoms through the cavity with a short time interval experiencing the two processes of the invariant dynamics between each atom and the cavity…
We study two-photon excitation of Rydberg states of atoms under stimulated adiabatic passage with delayed laser pulses. We find that the combination of strong interaction between the atoms in Rydberg state and the spontaneous decay of the intermediate exited atomic state leads to the Rydberg excitation of precisely one atom within the atomic ensemble. The quantum Zeno effect offers a lucid interpretation of this result: the Rydberg blocked atoms repetitively scattering photons effectively monitor a randomly excited atom which therefore remains in the Rydberg state. This system can be used for …
We examine the conditions needed to accomplish stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) when the three levels (g, e and f) are degenerate, with arbitrary couplings contributing to the pump-pulse interaction (g - e) and to the Stokes-pulse interaction (e-f). We show that in general a sufficient condition for complete population removal from the g set of degenerate states for arbitrary, pure or mixed, initial state is that the degeneracies should not decrease along the sequence g, e and f. We show that when this condition holds it is possible to achieve the degenerate counterpart of conventio…
We implement high-efficiency coherent excitation to a Rydberg state using stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in a cold atom electron and ion source. We achieve an efficiency of 60% averaged over the laser excitation volume with a peak efficiency of 82%, a 1.6 times improvement relative to incoherent pulsed-laser excitation. Using pulsed electric field ionization of the Rydberg atoms we create electron bunches with durations of 250 ps. High-efficiency excitation will increase source brightness, crucial for ultrafast electron diffraction experiments, and coherent excitation to high-lying Rydberg…
We study dynamics of a two-color photoassociation of atoms into diatomic molecules via nonlinear Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) process. This system has a famous counterpart in (linear) quantum mechanics, and been discussed recently in the context of generalizing quantum adiabatic theorem to nonlinear systems. Here we use another approach to study adiabaticity and stability in the system: we apply methods of classical Hamiltonian dynamics. We found nonlinear dynamical instabilities, cases of complete integrability, and improved conditions of adiabaticity.
The technique of stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP), which allows efficient and selective population transfer between quantum states without suffering loss due to spontaneous emission, was introduced in 1990 (Gaubatz \emph{et al.}, J. Chem. Phys. \textbf{92}, 5363, 1990). Since then STIRAP has emerged as an enabling methodology with widespread successful applications in many fields of physics, chemistry and beyond. This article reviews the many applications of STIRAP emphasizing the developments since 2000, the time when the last major review on the topic was written (Vitanov \emph{et…
The space-time method is applied to a model system-the Simple Harmonic Oscillator in a laser field to simulate the Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) process. The Space-Time method is a computational theory first introduced by Weatherford et. al. to solve Time-Dependent Systems with one boundary value and applied to electron spin system with invariant Hamiltonian [Journal of Molecular Structure {\bf 592} 47]. The implementation in the present work provides an efficient and general way to solve the Time-Dependent Schr{ö}dinger Equation and can be applied to multi-state systems. The alg…
In digital circuits, a Flip-Flop (FF) is a circuit element that has two stable states which can be used to store and remember state information. The state of the circuit can be changed by applying signals to the control input. FFs are the basic building blocks of sequential logic circuits, as logic gates AND,OR, NOT are the basic building block for combinational logic circuits, and are therefore necessary for any computations involving memory. Consequently, the design and implementation of FFs can be considered as a pre-requisite for memory machine design. Here we present the design of an opti…
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) describes adiabatic population transfer between two states coherently coupled via a mediating state that remains unoccupied. This renders STIRAP robust against loss in the mediating state, leading to profound applications in atomic- and molecular-beam research, trapped-ion physics, superconducting circuits, other solid-state systems, optics, in entanglement generation and qubit operations. STIRAP in optomechanics has been considered for optical frequency conversion where a mechanical mode provides the mediating state. Given the advances of optomechan…
We analyze coherent two-color photoassociation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, focusing on stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in free-bound-bound transitions from atoms to molecules. This problem is of particular interest since STIRAP is predicted to be necessarily absent in the nondegenerate case [Javanainen and Mackie, Phys. Rev. A 58, R789 (1998)]. However, Bose-stimulation enhances the free-bound dipole matrix element for an atomic condensate, and photoassociative STIRAP turns out to be a viable mechanism for converting an atomic condensate to a molecular condensate with near-unit …
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a well established technique for producing coherent population transfer in a three-state quantum system. We here exploit the resemblance between the Schrodinger equation for such a quantum system and the Newton equation of motion for a classical system undergoing torque to discuss several classical analogs of STIRAP, notably the motion of a moving charged particle subject to the Lorentz force of a quasistatic magnetic field, the orientation of a magnetic moment in a slowly varying magnetic field, the Coriolis effect and the inertial frame dragging…
Collective two-color photoassociation of a freely-interacting 87Rb 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); cond-mat/0110578] 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 c…
Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a standard technique to combat experimental imperfections and can be used to realize robust quantum state control, which has many applications in physics, chemistry, and beyond. However, STIRAP is susceptible to decoherence since it requires long evolution time. To overcome this problem, stimulated Raman user-defined passage (STIRUP) is proposed, which allows users to design the passages unlike the STIRAP but fast and robust against both decoherence and experimental imperfections. Here, we further develop a more general STIRUP method. Comparing wi…
The adiabatic manipulation of quantum states is a powerful technique that has opened up new directions in quantum engineering, enabling tests of fundamental concepts such as the Berry phase and its nonabelian generalization, the observation of topological transitions, and holds the promise of alternative models of quantum computation. Here we benchmark the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage process for circuit quantum electrodynamics, by using the first three levels of a transmon qubit. We demonstrate a population transfer efficiency above 80% between the ground state and the second excited st…
Adiabatic passage techniques, used to drive a system from one quantum state into another, find widespread application in physics and chemistry. We focus on techniques to spatially transport a quantum amplitude over a strongly coupled system, such as STImulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) and Coherent Tunnelling by Adiabatic Passage (CTAP). Previous results were shown to work on certain graphs, such as linear chains, square and triangular lattices, and branched chains. We prove that similar protocols work much more generally, in a large class of (semi-)bipartite graphs. In particular, unde…
We introduce a novel procedure for qubit rotation, alternative to the commonly used method of Rabi oscillations of controlled pulse area. It is based on the technique of Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP) and therefore it is robust against fluctuations of experimental parameters. Furthermore, our work shows that it is in principle possible to perform quantum logic operations via stimulated Raman adiabatic passage. This opens up the search for a completely new class of schemes to implement logic gates.