Physicists created a holographic wormhole in a quantum computer, a kind of tunnel that was theorized in the year 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. This wormhole leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space. Researchers were able to send a signal through the open wormhole, though it’s not clear in what sense the wormhole can be said to exist.
Almost a century ago, Albert Einstein realized that the equations of general relativity could produce wormholes. But it would take a number of theoretical leaps and a crazy team of experimentalists to build one on Google’s quantum computer. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen stumbled across the possibility of wormholes in a 1935 paper.
The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel wormhole teleportation protocol using Google’s quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California.
The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or qubits, stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole
Maria Spiropulu says that this is a first-of-its-kind quantum gravity experiment on a chip. She and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.
This experiment can be seen as evidence for the holographic principle which is a sweeping hypothesis about how the two pillars of fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity, fit together.
Einstein and Rosen speculated that Schwarzschild’s math might be a way to plug elementary particles into general relativity. To make the picture work, they snipped the singularity out of his equations, swapping in new variables that replaced the sharp point with an extra-dimensional tube sliding to another part of space-time. Einstein and Rosen argued, wrongly but presciently, that these bridges (or wormholes) might represent particles.
Alex Zlokapa, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who joined the wormhole project as an undergrad, found a way to simplify the wormhole protocol enough to run it on Google’s quantum computer.
Read the full article at Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/
