Effect of micromotion and local stress in quantum simulations with trapped ions in optical tweezers

The ability to program and control interactions provides the key to implementing large-scale quantum simulation and computation in trapped-ion systems. Adding optical tweezers, which can tune the phonon spectrum and thus modify the phonon-mediated spin-spin interaction, was recently proposed as a way of programing quantum simulators for a broader range of spin models [Arias Espinoza et al., Phys. Rev. A 104, 013302 (2021)]. In this work we study the robustness of our findings in the presence of experimental imperfections: micromotion, local stress, and intensity noise. We show that the effects of micromotion can be easily circumvented when designing and optimizing tweezer patterns to generate a target interaction. Furthermore, while local stress, whereby the tweezers apply small forces on individual ions, may appear to enable further tuning of the spin-spin interactions, any additional flexibility is negligible. We conclude that optical tweezers are a useful method for controlling interactions in trapped-ion quantum simulators in the presence of micromotion and imperfections in the tweezer alignment, but require intensity stabilization on the subpercent level.