Juan Gonzalo Muga

Shuttling protocols designed by shortcut-to-adiabaticity techniques may suffer from perturbations and imperfect implementations. We study the motional excitation of a single ion shuttled in harmonic traps with time-dependent, "systematic" oscillatory perturbations around the nominal parameters. These elementary perturbations could form any other by superposition. Robust shuttling strategies are proposed and compared, and optimizations are performed.

We inverse engineer fast rotations of a linear trap with two ions for a predetermined rotation angle and time, avoiding final excitation. Different approaches are analyzed and compared when the ions are of the same species or of different species. The separability into dynamical normal modes for equal ions in a common harmonic trap, or for different ions in non-harmonic traps with up to quartic terms allows for simpler computations of the rotation protocols. For non-separable scenarios, in particular for different ions in a harmonic trap, rotation protocols are also found using more costly numerical optimisations.

We investigate the effect of slow spring-constant drifts of the trap used to shuttle two ions of different mass. We design transport protocols to suppress or mitigate the final excitation energy by applying invariant-based inverse engineering, perturbation theory, and a harmonic dynamical normal-mode approximation. A simple, explicit trigonometric protocol for the trap trajectory is found to be robust with respect to the spring-constant drifts.