Fast trapped-ion entangling gates with Fourier amplitude modulation

Trapped-ion qubits have long coherence times and support high-fidelity single-qubit and two-qubit gates. However, entangling gates are slow compared to other quantum computing platforms, typically on the order of hundreds of microseconds. Faster gates will help scale up to larger computations and improve the viability of trapped-ion quantum computers. One model of fast gates on trapped ions was discussed in [New J. Phys. 16, 053049 (2014)], where timings of pulse sequences were optimized to improve gate times of light-shift entangling gates. Rather than employing sequences of square pulses, we investigate pulse shaping as a source for the parameter space. We model the amplitude envelope as a Fourier series, as in [Phys. Rev. A 111, 062422 (2025)] and expect that power optimization can be included in the model. The optimal gate time and power requirements of single shaped pulses are compared to the pulse sequences found in the previous literature.