Adiabatic manipulation of a system interacting with a spin-bath

Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage, a very efficient technique for manipulating a quantum system based on the adiabatic theorem, is analyzed in the case where the manipulated physical system is interacting with a spin bath. Exploitation of the rotating wave approximation allows for the identification of a constant of motion which simplifies both the analytical and the numerical treatment, which allows for evaluating the total unitary evolution of system and bath. The efficiency of the population transfer process is investigated in several regimes, including the weak and strong coupling with the environment and the off-resonance. The formation of appropriate Zeno subspaces explains the lowering of the efficiency in the strong damping regime.