Robust two-qubit gates in a linear ion crystal using a frequency-modulated driving force

In an ion trap quantum computer, collective motional modes are used to entangle two or more qubits in order to execute multi-qubit logical gates. Any residual entanglement between the internal and motional states of the ions results in loss of fidelity, especially when there are many spectator ions in the crystal. We propose using a frequency-modulated (FM) driving force to minimize such errors. In simulation, we obtained an optimized FM two-qubit gate that can suppress errors to less than 0.01% and is robust against frequency drifts over $pm$1 kHz. Experimentally, we have obtained a two-qubit gate fidelity of $98.3(4)%$, a state-of-the-art result for two-qubit gates with 5 ions.