Extracting Information from Adaptive Control Experiments

Optical control of chemical reactivity is achieved through the use of photonic reagents, that is, “shaped” ultrafast optical pulses created using a pulse shaper. It has been demonstrated in a number of molecular systems that these pulses can effectively guide the system into a desired final state. Effective pulses are often found through an experimental search involving thousands of individual measurements. An examination of the pulses tested in these experiments can reveal the pulse features responsible for control and also the underlying molecular dynamics. In this article we review attempts to extract information from optical control experiments using adaptive learning algorithms to search the available parameter space, and we discuss how these kinds of experiments can be used to achieve and understand multiphoton optical control.