  We investigate pump-dump photoassociation of ultracold molecules with
amplitude- and phase-modulated femtosecond laser pulses. For this purpose a
perturbative model for the light-matter interaction is developed and combined
with a genetic algorithm for adaptive feedback control of the laser pulse
shapes. The model is applied to the formation of 85Rb2 molecules in a
magneto-optical trap. We find for optimized pulse shapes an improvement for the
formation of ground state molecules by more than a factor of 10 compared to
unshaped pulses at the same pump-dump delay time, and by 40% compared to
unshaped pulses at the respective optimal pump-dump delay time. Since our model
yields directly the spectral amplitudes and phases of the optimized pulses, the
results are directly applicable in pulse shaping experiments.
