Wavepacket dancing: Achieving chemical selectivity by shaping light pulses

Abstract The Tannor-Rice pump-dump scheme for controlling the selectivity of product formation in a chemical reaction is improved by development of a method for optimizing the field of a particular product with respect to the shapes of the pump and dump pulses. Numerical studies of the optimization of product yield in a model system of the same type as studied by Tannor and Rice illustrate the enhancement possible with pulse shaping.