Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage into continuum

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 spontaneous emission through the lossy state. For strong spontaneous emission from that state, however, the ionization is never complete because the dark state required for STIRAP does not exist. We demonstrate that this drawback can be eliminated almost completely by creating a laser-induced continuum structure (LICS) by embedding a third discrete state into the continuum with a third control laser. This LICS introduces some coherence into the continuum, which enables a STIRAP-like population transfer into the continuum. A highly accurate analytic description is developed and numerical results are presented for Gaussian pulse shapes

Broadband sum frequency generation via chirped quasi-phase-matching

An efficient broadband sum frequency generation (SFG) technique using the two collinear optical parametric processes \omega 3=\omega 1+\omega 2 and \omega 4=\omega 1+\omega 3 is proposed. The technique uses chirped quasi-phase-matched gratings, which, in the undepleted pump approximation, make SFG analogous to adiabatic population transfer in three-state systems with crossing energies in quantum physics. If the local modulation period %for aperiodically poled quasi-phase-matching first makes the phase match occur for \omega 3 and then for \omega 4 SFG processes then the energy is converted adiabatically to the \omega 4 field. Efficient SFG of the \omega 4 field is also possible by the opposite direction of the local modulation sweep; then transient SFG of the \omega 3 field is strongly reduced. Most of these features remain valid in the nonlinear regime of depleted pump