Coherent control of bond breaking in amino acid complexes with tailored femtosecond pulses.

Intense femtosecond laser pulses, judiciously tailored in an adaptive, optimal control feedback loop were used to break preferentially the acyl-N (“peptide”) bond of Ac-Phe-NHMe that may be regarded as a dipeptide model. We show that coherent excitation of complex wave packets in the strong-field regime allows to cleave strong backbone bonds in the molecular system preferentially, while keeping other more labile bonds intact. These results show the potential of pulse shaping as a powerful complementary analytical tool for protein sequencing of large biopolymers in addition to the well-known mass spectrometry and chemical analysis.