QUANTUM CONTROL

摘要

Almost since the dawn of the age of lasers, chemists have been envisioning a world where they could control molecular reactions. With the precision of a scalpel, monochromatic laser beams would excite and break only targeted bonds; pesky side reactions would be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, all sorts of difficulties have worked to stymie those goals, not the least of which is the need to know the details of the quantum mechanical wave function describing the system—an intractable mathematical task. And so for years, so-called quantum control of anything more than the most rudimentary chemical systems had largely been a gleam in chemists' collective eye.