Abstract
We show that with adiabatic passage, one can reliably drive two-photon optical transitions between the ground states and interacting Rydberg states in a pair of atoms. For finite Rydberg interaction strengths a new adiabatic pathway towards the doubly Rydberg excited state is identified when a constant detuning is applied with respect to an intermediate optically excited level. The Rydberg interaction among the excited atoms provides a phase that may be used to implement quantum gate operations on atomic ground state qubits.