Engineering mixed states in a degenerate four-state system

A method is proposed for preparing any pure and a wide class of mixed quantum states in the decoherence-free ground-state subspace of a degenerate multilevel lambda system. The scheme is a combination of optical pumping and a series of coherent excitation processes, and for a given pulse sequence the same final state is obtained regardless of the initial state of the system. The method is robust with respect to the fluctuation of the pulse areas, like in adiabatic methods, however, the field amplitude can be adjusted in a larger range.