Adiabatic Dynamical Control Physics of Dielectric Media

We summarize recent developments in the area of the coherent propagation of laser pulses through dielectric media. We will show that the principle of dynamical adiabaticity opens new avenues to control the non-perturbative and resonant interaction between two laser pulses and a three-level medium. Examples include the formation of stable wave forms that can travel through optical dielectric media in a loss-free manner with arbitrary pulse shapes, novel possibilities to store optical information in dielectric media in the form of spatially dependent excitations and techniques to exploit this information to control laser pulse envelopes