Laser Control of Chemical Reactions.

Teams primarily involved:

• CERMICS, ENPC – Molecular simulation team (Eric Cancès)
  
  
• Molecular Photo-physic Laboratory, Université Paris Sud Orsay (Osman Atabek)
  
  
• System and Control Center, Ecole des Mines de Paris (Pierre Rouchon)
  
  
• Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, Université Paris VI (Andreas Savin)
  
  
• TAO Project, INRIA (Marc Schoenauer)
  
  

The objective of the project in this domain is to increase the contribution of numerical methods for the control by laser of the evolution of molecular systems in a quantum microscopic scale. From the practical point of view, the problem is not necessarily to reach exactly a given state of the system. In fact a qualitative objective, like for example orienting a molecule in space in order to prepare the system to exhibit some behaviour, might be at the same time more reachable and also more interesting. On the other side the chemists has observed that the real experiences are (at least currently) much faster than numerical simulations of Schrödinger equations. This leads to the idea of interfacing directly the experience with an optimization algorithm.

The very general notion of control in the quantum world lead to many fundamental questions:

• from a mathematical point of view: which kind of controllability are we talking about? which model is more reasonable to consider? which objective to ask? how to measure our success?
• from a numerical point of view: how to corroborate the experience with the computations, how to help experimentalists in their choices of lasers ? how to interpret the results?
  

Some work has already been done:

• C. M. Dion, A. Ben Haj Yedder, E. Cancès, A. Keller, C. Le Bris, and O. Atabek. Optimal laser control of orientation: The kicked molecule, Phys. Rev. A, 65:063408, 2002
  

• G. Turinici, C. LeBris, and H. Rabitz, Efficient algorithms for the laboratory discovery of optimal quantum controls, Phys. Rev. E, 70:016704, 2004.
  

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