  Entanglement generation can be robust against noise in approaches that
deliberately incorporate dissipation into the system dynamics. The presence of
additional dissipation channels may, however, limit fidelity and speed of the
process. Here we show how quantum optimal control techniques can be used to
both speed up the entanglement generation and increase the fidelity in a
realistic setup, whilst respecting typical experimental limitations. For the
example of entangling two trapped ion qubits [Lin et al., Nature 504, 415
(2013)], we find an improved fidelity by simply optimizing the polarization of
the laser beams utilized in the experiment. More significantly, an alternate
combination of transitions between internal states of the ions, when combined
with optimized polarization, enables faster entanglement and decreases the
error by an order of magnitude.
