  We present a method of treating the interaction of a single three-level ion
with two laser beams. The idea is to apply a unitary transformation such that
the exact transformed Hamiltonian has one of the three levels decoupled for all
values of the detunings. When one takes into account damping, the evolution of
the system is governed by a master equation usually obtained via adiabatic
approximation under the assumption of far-detuned lasers. To go around the
drawbacks of this technique, we use the same unitary transformation to get an
effective master equation.
