Optimal laser control of molecular systems: Methodology and results

We report on some mathematical and numerical work related to the control of the evolution of molecular systems using laser fields. More precisely, the control of the orientation of molecules is our goal. We treat this as an optimal control problem and optimize the laser field to be used experimentally by using both deterministic and stochastic algorithms. Comparisons between the different strategies are drawn. In particular, when gradients of the cost functional are used, the different ways for their computation are compared and analyzed.