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 [Vitanov and Stenholm, Phys. Rev. A 56, 1463 (1997)] shows that, in the weak-coupling limit, the two treatments lead to essentially the same results. In contrast, 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 of quantum Zeno dynamics.

• Received 18 March 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.053847