We present an adiabatic approach to the design of entangling quantum operations with two electron spins localized in separate InAs/GaAs quantum dots via the Coulomb interaction between optically-excited localized states. Slowly-varying optical pulses
minimize the pulse noise and the relaxation of the excited states. An analytic dressed state solution gives a clear physical picture of the entangling process, and a numerical solution is used to investigate the error dynamics. For two vertically-stacked quantum dots we show that, for a broad range of dot parameters, a two-spin state with concurrence $C>0.85$ can be obtained by four optical pulses with durations $sim 0.1 - 1$ ns.
