Scalable entangling gates on ion qubits via structured light addressing

A central challenge in developing practical quantum processors is maintaining low control complexity while scaling to large numbers of qubits. Trapped-ion systems excel in small-scale operations and support rapid qubit scaling via long-chain architectures. However, their performance in larger systems is hindered by spectral crowding in radial motional modes, a problem that forces reliance on intricate pulse-shaping techniques to maintain gate fidelities. Here, we overcome this challenge by developing a trapped-ion processor with an individual-addressing system that generates steerable Hermite-Gaussian beam arrays. The transversal gradient of these beams couples qubits selectively to sparse axial motional modes, enabling to isolate a single or few modes as entanglement mediator. Leveraging this capability, we demonstrate addressable two-qubit entangling gates in chains up to six ions, with Bell-state preparation fidelities consistently around 0.97, achieved without complex pulse shaping. Our method substantially reduces control overhead while preserving scalability, providing a crucial advance toward practical large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing.