• Accepted Paper

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

Zhe-Yu Shen, Lin Cheng, Sheng-Chen Liu, Jun-Yi Deng, and Liang-You Peng

APS Open Sci. - Accepted 14 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~(AM) 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 co-design of near-term quantum simulators.

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