Quantum optimal control of the dissipative production of a
maximally entangled state

Abstract
Entanglement generation can be robust against certain types of noise in approaches that deliberately
incorporate dissipation into the system dynamics. The presence of additional dissipation channels
may, however, limit fidelity and speed of the process. Here we show how quantum optimal control
techniques can be used to both speed up the entanglement generation and increase the fidelity in a
realistic setup, whilst respecting typical experimental limitations. For the example of entangling two
trapped ion qubits (Lin et al 2013 Nature 504 415), we find an improved fidelity by simply optimizing
the polarization of the laser beams utilized in the experiment. More significantly, an alternate
combination of transitions between internal states of the ions, when combined with optimized
polarization, enables faster entanglement and decreases the error by an order of magnitude.