We investigate the effect of slow spring-constant drifts of the trap used to shuttle two ions of different mass. We design transport protocols to suppress or mitigate the final excitation energy by applying invariant-based inverse engineering, perturbation theory, and a harmonic dynamical normal-mode approximation. A simple, explicit trigonometric protocol for the trap trajectory is found to be robust with respect to the spring-constant drifts.
@article{arxiv.1502.01430,
title = {Optimal transport of two ions under slow spring-constant drifts},
author = {Xiao-Jing Lu and Mikel Palmero and Andreas Ruschhaupt and Xi Chen and Juan Gonzalo Muga},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.01430},
year = {2015}
}