  The possibility of achieving highly selective excitation of low metastable
states of hydrogen and helium atoms by using short laser pulses with reasonable
parameters is demonstrated theoretically. Interactions of atoms with the laser
field are studied by solving the close-coupling equations without
discretization. The parameters of laser pulses are calculated using different
kinds of optimization procedures. For the excitation durations of hundreds of
femtoseconds direct optimization of the parameters of one and two laser pulses
with Gaussian envelopes is used to introduce a number of simple schemes of
selective excitation. To treat the case of shorter excitation durations,
optimal control theory is used and the calculated optimal fields are
approximated by sequences of pulses with reasonable shapes. A new way to
achieve selective excitation of metastable atomic states by using sequences of
attosecond pulses is introduced.
