Trapped-ion quantum simulators offer highly programmable spin-spin interactions, but many target Hamiltonians require non-native interaction structures and noncommuting terms that are difficult to realize directly. I will discuss recent work using hybrid digital-analog control to engineer effective non-native Hamiltonians, including many-body terms, in a trapped-ion processor. I will then describe a new control principle for making such simulations accurate: in noncommuting spin models, closing the phonon trajectories at the final time is not enough, because the full history of the mediator motion produces intrinsic simulation errors. We show that these errors can be strongly suppressed while preserving programmable interactions, enabling more expressive and accurate Hamiltonian engineering of many-body systems.

Or Katz is an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University, where his group develops quantum hardware based on ions, atoms, photons, and phonons. He received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Duke Quantum Center before joining Cornell in 2024.