ADIABATIC TRANSITION HISTORIES OF POPULATION TRANSFER IN THE LAMBDA-SYSTEM

The superadiabatic basis scheme developed by Berry [Proc. R. Sec. London 429, 61 (1990)] is used to analyze adiabatic population transfer in the Lambda system in what is known as the counterintuitive pulse scheme. For a specific choice of pulses, we find that the diabatic loss is given by the exponentially small (8-4 root 2)exp(-2/epsilon), where epsilon is a small parameter describing the adiabaticity of the process. We thus establish the connection between population transfer in the Lambda system and general adiabatic transition theory. We project numerical solutions onto superadiabatic basis states for the real three-level system and show how the history of population transfer has a very compact and universal history in one particular superadiabatic basis.