Not the Real McCoy, But Still: ‘Quantum Wormhole’ Created by Scientists
Wormhole
The study in question involved the creation of an entangled quantum system that essentially behaved akin to a gravitational wormhole.Researchers in the United States have announced that they managed to simulate a phenomenon that has been described in quite a few works of science fiction but has yet to be encountered in real life – a wormhole.A wormhole is essentially a hypothetical structure that could be described as a “tunnel” of sorts which connects two different points in space-time and which is consistent with the general theory of relativity.Using Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, a team of physicists from Caltech, Fermilab, Harvard, MIT and Google managed to create an entangled quantum system comprised of two so-called Sachdev-Ye Kitaev (SYK) models that essentially behaved like a wormhole, with information inserted into one SYK model emerging from the other SYK model.”We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” said Maria Spiropolu, a physicist at Caltech and co-author of the new study. “This work constitutes a step toward a larger program of testing quantum gravity physics using a quantum computer.”She also pointed out that the team’s work offers “a powerful testbed to exercise ideas of quantum gravity”, even though it “does not substitute for direct probes of quantum gravity in the same way as other planned experiments that might probe quantum gravity effects in the future using quantum sensing”, according to a press release by Caltech.
