  Stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) is a widely-used technique of
coherent state-to-state manipulation for many applications in physics,
chemistry, and beyond. The adiabatic evolution of the state involved in STIRAP,
called adiabatic passage, guarantees its robustness against control errors, but
also leads to problems of low efficiency and decoherence. Here we propose and
experimentally demonstrate an alternative approach, termed stimulated Raman
"user-defined" passage (STIRUP), where a parameterized state is employed for
constructing desired evolutions to replace the adiabatic passage in STIRAP. The
user-defined passages can be flexibly designed for optimizing different
objectives for different tasks, e.g. minimizing leakage error. To
experimentally benchmark its performance, we apply STIRUP to the task of
coherent state transfer in a superconducting Xmon qutrit. We found that STIRUP
completed the transfer more then four times faster than STIRAP with enhanced
robustness, and achieved a fidelity of 99.5%, which is the highest among all
recent experiments based on STIRAP and its variants. In practice, STIRUP
differs from STIRAP only in the design of driving pulses; therefore, most
existing applications of STIRAP can be readily implemented with STIRUP.
