Quantum Control (QC), sometimes referred to as Optimal Control or Coherent
Control, aims at altering the course of quantum dynamics phenomena for specific
target realizations, typically by means of closed-loop, adaptively shaped laser pulses.
This field has experienced a rapid increase of interest during recent years, in parallel to
the technological developments of ultrafast laser pulse shaping capabilities, that made
it possible to turn this early-days dream into reality. Quantum Control Experiments
(QCE), the topic of this talk, consider the realization of QC in the laboratory, where the
objective function evaluation cannot be done through a computer simulation, but rather
requires the execution of a real-world experiment. The optimization task of QC systems
typically introduces many challenges to the search (e.g., high-dimensionality, noise,
constraints handling, to name a few), and thus offers a rich domain for the development
and application of specialized optimizers. This talk will present the main characteristics
of QCE laboratory optimization, and particularly practical issues such as optimizer efficiency,
robustness of attained pulses, landscape exploration, and Pareto optimization
of multiple objectives. Toward that end, it will discuss a case-study with a great potential
for future applications, namely Optimal Dynamic Discrimination (ODD), where
extremely short shaped pulses allow for the differentiation of similar molecules. It will
also review a specific class of derandomized search heuristics which are especially attractive
for such tasks.
