Large-scale multimode entangling-gate synthesis in trapped-ion systems
Abstract
Trapped-ion systems have emerged as a leading platform for scalable quantum information processing owing to their high-fidelity operations and long-range entangling capabilities. As the number of ions in a trap increases, the growing density of collective motional modes makes the synthesis of multimode entangling gates increasingly challenging. Designing large-scale gates requires simultaneously realizing the desired spin-spin interactions, suppressing residual spin-motion entanglement, and limiting experimental control resources, leading to a high-dimensional non-convex optimization problem. Here we develop a numerical framework for multi-tone gate synthesis that directly searches for control fields satisfying these competing requirements. By employing an alternating-minimization strategy, the framework improves numerical stability and remains effective for large systems with many motional modes and target interactions. As representative demonstrations, we synthesize gates implementing all-to-all and nearest-neighbor interaction patterns in ion chains of up to N = 1000, using only global laser control. Across the parameter regimes explored here, the control resources required to maintain high-fidelity interactions do not exhibit rapid growth with system size. We extend the framework to individual addressing using a structured qLDPC target at N = 512 as an example. These results identify multimode gate synthesis as a viable route toward programmable interaction engineering in large-scale trapped-ion quantum processors.