Comment on "Quasicontinuum modeling of photoassociation"

We maintain that the reservations against the use of stimulated Raman adiabatic photoassociation in a nondegenerate gas, expressed by Mackie and Javanainen in a recent manuscript [Phys. Rev. A 60, 3174 (1999)], do not account for the coherence induced by the photoassociating laser. The authors treat the problem of two-color stimulated photoassociation using a set of decoupled three-mode problems, each containing a box eigenstate and the two bound states. We argue that such decomposition is not justified, since in the limit of a very large box all three-mode problems are, in fact, coherently coupled. The three-mode condition can only be met with a set of wave packets whose bandwidth matches the spectral width of the photoassociating pulse. Using this basis set, we show that by the authors' own formalism; stimulated Raman photoassociation is a viable process in the thermal ensemble.