Copyright © 2010 B. D. Fainberg and B. Levinsky. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We have considered a coherent population transfer to a higher excited singlet state () of molecules with anomalous fluorescence in molecular assemblies (e.g., a dense medium). A direct excitation to requires light in the UV region. Because of this, the transition is conveniently realized by a two-step (two-photon) process: , where transitions and correspond to the optical region. We have shown that efficient stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) in the ladder configuration can be realized in this case, using suitably chirped pulses, to compensate a change of the two-photon transition frequency in time, induced by the pulses themselves, due to near dipole-dipole interactions. We have provided a reduced state formulation of the optical control process. Chirping the “pump” pulse that excites transition is nonequivalent to chirping the “Stokes” pulse that excites transition , with respect to the population of the intermediate state () in the pulse nonadiabatic regime. We have also shown that with suitably chirped pulses, efficient STIRAP still persists even for a rather large decay of the intermediate state.