10.18453/rosdok_id00004776 Ramos Ramos, Alejandro Rubenovich Alejandro Rubenovich Ramos Ramos http://d-nb.info/gnd/1365099962 https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0922-1996 Universität Rostock 2024 530 Physics 540 Chemistry & allied sciences 2024 en https://purl.uni-rostock.de/rosdok/id00004776 urn:nbn:de:gbv:28-rosdok_id00004776-5 Controlling molecular processes by shaped laser pulses is a long-standing goal in Molecular Physics and Chemistry. Here, we suggest a direct optimal control approach based on a simultaneous simulation and optimization paradigm. This approach uses automatic differentiation, offering as advantages final time and model parameter optimization, as well as a wide range of terms in the performance functional and constraints that could be easily implemented in a plug-and-play fashion. The advantages of this approach will be showcased for diverse molecular model systems.