Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer

Physicists are said to have created the first-ever wormhole, a tunnel that leads from one place to another through an extradimensional space.

The hologram of quantum bits of information was created by the wormhole. Physicists reported in the journal Nature that they manipulated the qubits to send information.

The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel "wormhole teleportation protocol" using a quantum computer. With this first-of-its-kind experiment on a chip, she and her team beat a group of physicists who wanted to use IBM andQuantinuum.

She said that when she saw the key signature, she was shook.

The experiment shows how the two pillars of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity fit together. Since the 1930s, physicists have been trying to reconcile Einstein's description of how matter and energy warp the space-time fabric with the rules for atoms and particles. There is a mathematical equivalence between the two frameworks. The bendy space-time continuum is actually a quantum system of particles. As a 3D hologram projects out of a 2D pattern, space-time and gravity can be seen.

The new experiment shows that the type of quantum effects we can control in a quantum computer can lead to a phenomenon that we expect to see in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who was not involved in the experiment, said that the evolving system of qubits has a cool alternative description. The system can be thought of in a different way.

The wormhole isn't something we can see. It isn't part of the same reality that we and the Sycamore computer live in. There are two realities, one with a wormhole and the other with qubits, but how to see them in a different way is a mystery.

Some people think that the result is important, while others think it's not. The space-time of our own universe is not the same as the space-time of the experiment. The experiment may or may not further the hypothesis that the space-time we are in is patterned by quantum bits.

I think that gravity in our universe is the result of some quantum bits in the same way that a baby one-dimensional wormhole is the result of some quantum bits. We don't know that for certain. We're trying to comprehend it.

Into the Wormhole

There are two papers published in 1935, one by Einstein and the other by the two of them and Boris Podolsky. The ER and EPR papers have changed their minds.

Einstein and his assistant, Rosen, stumbled upon the possibility of wormholes while trying to extend general relativity into a unified theory of everything, a description not only of space-time, but of the subatomic particles suspended in it. In 1916, just months after Einstein's theory of general relativity was published, a German physicist found a piece of space-time fabric. It was shown that mass can attract itself so much that it becomes infinitely concentrated at a point. This is the first time we know that these things exist in the universe. Each point is hidden at the center of a black hole that traps all nearby light. There is a need for a quantum theory of gravity in singularities.

Einstein and Rosen were interested in the idea of plugging elementary particles into general relativity. They replaced the sharp point with an extra-dimensional tube in order to make the picture work. Einstein and Rosen were wrong to argue that thesebridges could represent particles.

The duo did not consider the strange particle phenomenon they had identified two months before in the EPR paper: quantum entanglement.

Two particles interacting causesanglement. Particles can have many possible states at the same time. Depending on which state each particle is in, an interaction between particles has multiple possibilities. How particle A ends up is dependent on how particle B ends up. The particles have a formula that tells them which state they are in.

Einstein said that measuring particle A instantly decides the state of B, no matter how far away B is.

Physicists discovered in the 1990's thatanglement allows new kinds of computations. Four different states with different likelihoods can be achieved withangling two qubits. The power of a "quantum computer" increases with each entangled qubit. You can cancel out all combinations of 0s and 1s except the sequence that gives the answer to a calculation if you organize theentanglement. The last couple of years have seen the emergence of a few dozen quantum computers.

The possible source code of the space-time hologram is the focus of quantum gravity researchers.

ER = EPR

The black hole theorist John Wheeler promulgated the view that space-time and everything in it might come from information in the late 1980's. The emergence was questioned if it resembled the projection of a hologram. Black hole studies and string theory have examples where a description of a physical scenario can be translated into an equally valid view. In a 1994 paper titled " The World as a Hologram," Leonard Susskind argued that a volume of bendy space-time is equivalent to Hooft's holographic principle.

Three years later, there was an example of hologram. The Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey has a quantum gravity theorist named Juan Maldacena.

The universe is driven outward by its own positive energy. AdS space has a negative energy because of a difference in the sign of one constant in the equations of general relativity. The properties of a quantum system on the boundary correspond to space-time and gravity in an AdS universe.

Maldacena's 1997 paper about the "AdS/CFT correspondence" has been cited thousands of times. Thousands of the best theorists for decades have been trying to exploit ideas based on AdS/CFT.

Maldacena made a new discovery while exploring his AdS/CFT map. He was studying a pattern in which two particles are entangled in each other. Maldacena showed that this state is both a hologram and a pair of black holes.

He realized that his discovery might signify a more general correspondence between quantumentanglement and connection via wormhole after a decade. He came up with an equation in an email to Susskind. The Einstein Rosen bridge between two black holes is created by EPR-like correlations between the microstates of the two black holes.

A spatial connection that records their shared histories could be forged by a wormhole. Einstein had a hunch that there were particles.

A Sturdy Bridge

When Maldacena talked about ER and EPR at a conference, he realized that he could tailor the entanglement pattern to his liking.

Standard Einstein-Rosen bridges are disappointing to sci-fi fans because they would collapse under their own weight and be hard to navigate. A wire could be strung between the two sets of particles that are entangled. The particles on one side would change and the particles on the other would stay the same. Is that the reason that the wormhole istraversable? The man remembers wondering. He started at Yale University at 14 and was fascinated by wormholes since he was a child.

He and Ping Gao, his graduate student at the time, and Aron Wall, a visiting researcher, calculated that if you put two sets of entangled particles together, you can perform an operation on the left hand set.

The 2016 discovery of this traversable wormhole gave researchers a new insight into the mechanics of holograms. The fact that you can get through if you do the right things from the outside is a good sign. Two entangled systems get described by some connected geometry.

Maldacena and two colleagues showed that a simple quantum system could be used to realize the traversable wormhole.

The SYK model is a system of particles that are interacting in groups. When the theoretical physicist Alexei Kitaev discovered that the model is holograms, it made the model much more important. At a lecture in Santa Barbara, California, Kitaev filled several chalkboards with evidence that the particular version of the model in which matter particles interact in groups of four can be mapped to a one-dimensional black hole. The answers in the two cases are the same. Maldacena was seated in the front.

Maldacena and co-authors proposed that there could be two SYK models that could be linked together to form a single entity. The approach was run by the two men. They were able to come up with a prescription for transferring a bit of information from one system to another. A negative-energy shock wave sweeps through the wormhole, kicking the qubit forward and leaving a predictable time out of the mouth.

A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a co-author of a new experiment that shows the relation holds for a particular system.

Wormhole in the Lab

Maria Spiropulu, an accomplished particle physicist who was involved in the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, was thinking about how to use quantum computers to do quantum gravity experiments. She persuaded them to join her growing team.

Spiropulu's team had to simplify the protocol in order to run it on the state-of-the-art but small quantum computer. A full SYK model consists of a lot of particles coupled to one another with random strengths. Hundreds of thousands of circuit operations would have been needed to calculate this. Researchers set out to create a hologram with just seven qubits. They had to change the model to only the strongest four-way interactions and keep the model's holographic properties. It took a couple of years to find a clever way to do it.

The waifish orchestra kid who joined Spiropulu's research group as a Caltech undergrad was one of the secrets to success. The system was trained to remove as many network connections as possible while preserving a key wormhole signature, thanks to a gifted programmer who mapped the particle interactions of the SYK model onto the connections between neuron of a neural network. The number of interactions decreased from hundreds to five.

The team began to program the qubits. Every particle on the right is entangled with one on the left in the left and right systems. The eighth qubit is swapped with one of the particles from the left model. The qubit gets tangled up with the states of the other particles on the left, spreading its information evenly among them. The qubit enters the left mouth of a one-dimensional wormhole.

The big rotation of all the qubits brings with it a pulse of negative energy. The injected qubit is transferred to the particles of the right hand model. Preskill said that the information un-spreads and refocuses at the site of a single particle on the right. The states are measured. If you compare the 0s and 1s over many experimental runs to the prepared state of the injected qubits, you'll see if they're Teleporting over.

If there is a peak in the data that shows a difference between the two cases, it means qubit rotation that is dual to negative-energy and positive-energy is allowing qubits to travel. The wormhole closes because they cause it to.

After two years of gradual improvements and noise reduction efforts, the protocol was run from his childhood bedroom in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he was spending winter break after his first semester of graduate school.

He could see the peak on his screen.

He said that it continued to get sharper and sharper. I was excited when I sent a screen shot of the peak to Maria and wrote, "I think we see a wormhole now" It was the first sign of gravity on a quantum computer.

She was seeing a clean peak. She said it was similar to the first data for the discovery. It came too much in my face.

The researchers found a second signature of wormhole dynamics, a delicate pattern in the way information spread and un-spread among the qubits. They hadn't trained their neural network to preserve the signal, so the fact that size-winding shows up anyway is an experiment.

The size-winding property popped out, but we didn't demand anything. He said that this confirmed the robustness of the hologram. If you make one property appear, then you get all the others, which is a kind of proof that the picture is correct.

The Meaning of the Wormhole

One of the most important conclusions from the experiment is that quantum mechanics are important. We don't know how a measurement of particle A is used to determine B's state from afar. The new experiment has a tangible interpretation of an ineffable quantum phenomenon that1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 There seems to be a nice story from the perspective of the qubit. It feels like a quantum process when it's happening. It will tell us something deep about our universe if something like that comes out of this experiment.

He hopes that future experiments with many more qubits can be used to investigate the quantum properties of gravity. He said that it was possible to see what was in the inside of what was measured. That appears to me to be an interesting way to travel.

Physicists will say that the experiment doesn't tell us anything about our universe because it shows a duality between quantum mechanics and anti-de Sitter space.

In the 25 years since Maldacena discovered the AdS/CFT correspondence, physicists have sought a similar hologram for de Sitter space. The pace of progress has been slower than for AdS. The questions "What about getting this to work in the more physical case of dS?" are not new but have been the subject of tens of thousands of person years of unsuccessful effort. Some different ideas are needed.

There is no smooth mathematical transition between AdS and dS because AdS has an outer boundary and dS doesn't. The quantum surface from which to project the space is provided by AdS space. Our universe's boundaries are the farthest we can see and the infinite future. These are67531s from which to project a hologram.

The wormhole experiment is concerned with 2D space-time, with one spatial dimensions and the time dimensions, whereas gravity is more complicated in the 4D space- She said by email that it's tempting to get entangled in the 2D toy models while forgetting about the bigger challenges that await us in 4D quantum gravity. I can't see how quantum computers with their current capabilities can help.

The entanglement pattern that weaves 4D de Sitter space is more complicated than 2D AdS but we can still extract general lessons from studying it. The two types of space, dS and AdS, are similar to one another. There are two solutions to Einstein's theory. Both dS and AdS universes have the same paradoxes. When you are deep in AdS space, far from the outer wall, you don't have a good idea of what's going on.

It's time to get real. He thinks it's time to get out of AdS space and open up into the world that might have more to do with cosmology. The de Sitter space is a big deal.

There is a new idea by the man. In a preprint posted online in September, he proposed that de Sitter space could be a hologram of a different version of the SYK model, in which the number of particles involved in each interaction grows as the square root of the total grows. He said that the double-scaled limit of the model is more similar to de Sitter than AdS. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence.

The quantum system is more complex than the one programmed so far, and whether that limit is something that will be realized in the lab is unknown. More will open up now that there is a single hologram.