Coherent spectral hole burning and qubit isolation by stimulated Raman adiabatic passage

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 a high flexibility and accuracy, and at variance with traditional spectral hole burning techniques, it may require substantially fewer 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 and target states. Finally, we show that the pulses can be reversed to create narrow absorption structures inside a broad spectral hole, which can be used as qubits for precise quantum operations on inhomogeneously broadened few-level systems.