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Global entangling gates for trapped ions: Numerical design and gate-efficient compilation for Hamiltonian simulation

Zhe-Yu Shen1, Lin Cheng2, Sheng-Chen Liu1, Jun-Yi Deng1, and Liang-You Peng1,3,*

  • 1State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics and Frontiers Science Center for Nano-optoelectronics, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2Future Research Lab, China Mobile Research Institute, Beijing 100053, China
  • 3Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China

  • *Contact author: liangyou.peng@pku.edu.cn
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APS Open Sci. 1, 000186 – Published 26 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rfgl-6q15

Abstract

As quantum computing scales up, circuits relying on sequential two-qubit gates face severe challenges from excessive depth and decoherence. In trapped-ion systems, global entangling gates offer a highly parallel alternative but are hindered by complex numerical optimization. We propose an efficient numerical framework for piecewise-constant amplitude-modulated global gates. Based on the Mølmer-Sørensen protocol, we utilize null-space projection for linear constraints of spin-motion coupling and tangent-space gradient descent to minimize laser power, while achieving high-order robustness against frequency drifts. At the application level, we identify a structural correspondence between hardware-native global interactions and Pauli strings in Hamiltonian simulation and propose an efficient compilation scheme. By reducing common physical models to fundamental XX interactions and formulating interaction graph partitioning as a Set Cover problem, we leverage global gates to significantly optimize the compilation process. Explicit pulse-level benchmarks further show that, for the tested weighted interaction graphs, the reduction in entangling-gate count can translate into a substantial reduction in total entangling duration. These results demonstrate that integrating hardware-native operations with tailored compilation strategies can substantially reduce circuit overhead, providing a practical roadmap for the codesign of near-term quantum simulators.

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Outline

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APS Open Sci. 1, 000186– Published 26 October, 2026
Vol. 1
  • Received 9 April 2026
  • Revised 22 August 2026
  • Accepted 14 October 2026
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