Advanced control with a Cooper-pair box: stimulated Raman adiabatic passage and Fock-state generation in a nanomechanical resonator

The rapid experimental progress in the field of superconducting nanocircuits gives rise to an increasing quest for advanced quantum-control techniques for these macroscopically coherent systems. Here we demonstrate theoretically that stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) should be possible with the quantronium setup of a Cooper-pair box. The scheme appears to be robust against decoherence and should be realizable even with the existing technology. As an application we present a method to generate single-phonon states of a nanomechnical resonator by vacuum-stimulated adiabatic passage with the superconducting nanocircuit coupled to the resonator.