We present a method to control photodissociation by manipulating the bond
softening mechanism occurring in strong shaped laser fields, by varying the
chirp sign and magnitude of an ultra-short laser pulse. Manipulation of
bond-softening is experimentally demonstrated for strong field (795 nm, 10^12 -
10^13 W/cm^2) photodissociation of H2+, exhibiting substantial increase of
dissociation by positively chirped pulses with respect to both negatively
chirped and transform limited pulses. The measured kinetic energy release and
angular distributions are used to quantify the degree of control of
dissociation. The control mechanism is attributed to the interplay of dynamic
alignment and chirped light induced potential curves.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
