High-order coherent control sequences of finite-width pulses

The performance of sequences of designed pulses of finite length τ is analyzed for a bath of spins and it is compared with that of sequences of ideal, instantaneous pulses. The degree of the design of the pulse strongly affects the performance of the sequences. Non-equidistant, adapted sequences of pulses, which equal instantaneous ones up to Script O(τ³), outperform equidistant or concatenated sequences. Moreover, they do so at low energy cost which grows only logarithmically with the number of pulses, in contrast to standard pulses with linear growth.