Multi-mode global driving of trapped ions for quantum circuit synthesis

Abstract We study the use of global drives with multiple frequency components to improve the efficiency of trapped ion quantum simulations and computations. We show that such ‘multi-mode’ global drives, when combined with a linear number of single-qubit rotations, generate universal Ising-type interactions with shorter overall runtimes than corresponding two-qubit gate implementations. Further, we show how this framework may be extended to efficiently generate <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>−</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> body interactions between any subset n of the ion qubits. Finally, we apply these techniques to encode the Quantum Fourier Transform using quadratically-fewer entangling operations, with quadratically smaller runtime, compared with traditional approaches.