Physicists Say They Made a Mini-Wormhole in the Quantum Realm
upstart writes:
Pesky quantum behaviors are getting us closer to figuring out quantum gravity:
If you thought entangling qubits using the Fibonacci sequence was confusing, you'd better hold onto something. A team of physicists recently found that quantum systems can imitate wormholes, theorized shortcuts in spacetime, in that the systems allow the instantaneous transit of information between remote locations.
[...] Let's slow down momentarily. To be clear, the researchers did not literally send quantum information through a rupture in spacetime, which in theory could connect two separate regions of spacetime. (Imagine folding a piece of paper and stabbing a pencil through the two layers. The paper is spacetime, and you now have a portal between two very distant areas.)
An idea floating around in theoretical physics is that wormholes are equivalent to quantum entanglement, which Einstein famously referred to as "spooky action at a distance." That means that, even at great distances, entangled quantum particles are defined by the spin of each other. Because quantum particles have this unique connection, they're a great test-bed for teleportation.
In 2017, a different team demonstrated that the way theorized wormholes in spacetime are described gravitationally is equivalent to the transmission of quantum information. The recent team has been looking at the issue themselves for a few years. [...]
The team put a qubit (a quantum bit) into a special quantum system and observed information exiting from another system. The information they had put to one quantum system had traveled through the quantum equivalent of a wormhole to exit from the other system, according to their paper.
The teleportation of the quantum information was simultaneously what was expected from a quantum physical perspective and from the gravitational understanding of how an object would travel through a wormhole, the researchers said.
Journal Reference:
Jafferis, D., Zlokapa, A., Lykken, J.D. et al. Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor. Nature 612, 51-55 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3
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