  The past decade has demonstrated increasing interests in using optimal
control based methods within coherent quantum controllable systems. The
versatility of such methods has been demonstrated with particular elegance
within nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) where natural separation between
coherent and dissipative spin dynamics processes has enabled coherent quantum
control over long periods of time to shape the experiment to almost ideal
adoption to the spin system and external manipulations. This has led to new
design principles as well as powerful new experimental methods within magnetic
resonance imaging, liquid-state and solid-state NMR spectroscopy. For this
development to continue and expand, it is crucially important to constantly
improve the underlying numerical algorithms to provide numerical solutions
which are optimally compatible with implementation on current instrumentation
and at same time are numerically stable and offer fast monotonic convergence
towards the target. Addressing such aims, we here present a smoothing
monotonically convergent algorithm for pulse sequence design in magnetic
resonance which with improved optimization stability lead to smooth pulse
sequence easier to implement experimentally and potentially understand within
the analytical framework of modern NMR spectroscopy.

Quantum Physics;Optimization and Control;Chemical Physics