“…[1][2][3][4]11,13,35 Very often, control of quantum phenomena is expressed as the minimization of a setting-dependent cost functional that describes the goal to be attained and the eventual penalties to consider. Three types of generic minimization procedures have been used in the literature: stochastic iterative approaches (e.g., genetic algorithms), 7,15 iterative critical point methods that use adjoint state information and give rise to monotonic algorithms, 10,17,29,32,36 and tracking or local control procedures 6,8,12,16,20,30,31 that obtain explicitly the control field from the prescribed trajectory that the system is required to take (and devise additional techniques to avoid eventual singularities). The advantage of this last class of methods is that it only requires one (or few) propagations of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE); when larger systems are to be treated, this property may prove crucial for the numerical tractability of the simulations.…”