Scientists at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology have created the first-ever traversable wormhole model on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor and observed the key physical properties of a previously predicted wormhole. The results of the research were published in the journal Nature.
In 2013, physicists Juan Maldasena and Leonard Susskind showed that transmitting quantum information through a wormhole (ER) could be equivalent to quantum teleportation (EPR), known as the ER = EPR principle. In this case, the wormhole must be stable and passable, which is achieved due to the gravitational effect on the quantum effects created between the outer regions of the bound black holes. In the new experimental study, the researchers were able to simulate a wormhole through it using a quantum processor created by Google.
Anti-Desitter space (ADS) is space whose curvature is opposite to that of the rapidly expanding universe. Imaginary stretching of the ADF on a two-dimensional plane increases the size of the central areas and reduces the areas at the edges, reminiscent of Escher’s “Boundary of the Circle III” illustrations. Such curvature creates a gravitational field that pulls objects to the center of space, and at the same time nothing can touch the boundaries of the ADF.
Theoretical physicist Juan Maldasena showed in 1977 that the “3+1 world” represented by ADS with three spatial and one temporal dimensions is equivalent to the two-dimensional “2+1” world. The two-dimensional world, which is a mathematical explanation of quantum fields, is a kind of boundary where everything that happens in the “3+1 world” is reflected. This concept, which has become the basis of the holographic principle, is known as AdS/CFT correspondence. An important feature is that a 2+1 world without gravity is an alternative way of describing the ADF with gravity.
Scientists thought that a pair of black holes, whose interiors were connected by an Einstein-Rosen bridge, corresponded to a wormhole in two-dimensional anti-Desitter space (ADS2). In contrast, the wormhole in ADS2 can be explained by the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, which links quantum entanglement to the AdS/CFT correspondence. In other words, SYK is an application of the holographic principle, allowing the gravitational properties of a wormhole to be reduced to a quantum system by entanglement. In their study, the researchers used an even more simplified SYK model to implement a quantum teleporting protocol equivalent to a wormhole passing through ADS2 using a circuit of only nine qubits.
Despite the approximate nature of the SYK, the model turned out to retain key features of wormhole physics, including gravity. For example, to achieve quantum teleportation, scientists needed to generate a negative energy shock wave in the qubit system. This is consistent with the prediction that exotic matter is required for a wormhole to pass through. According to the scientists, the results show that quantum processors can be used to create models of quantum gravity.
Source: Port Altele
