Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer

I think this is very important experimental progress... and an excellent article...

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicist...-20221130/

A decade had to pass before Maldacena, in 2013 (under circumstances that “to be frank, I do not remember,” he says),  realized that his discovery might signify a more general correspondence between quantum entanglement and connection via wormhole. He coined a cryptic little equation — ER = EPR — in an email to Susskind, who understood immediately. The two quickly developed the conjecture together, writing, “We argue that the Einstein Rosen bridge between two black holes is created by EPR-like correlations between the microstates of the two black holes,” and that the duality might be more general than that: “It is very tempting to think that any EPR correlated system is connected by some sort of ER bridge.”

Jafferis imagined stringing a wire or any other physical connection between the two sets of entangled particles that encode a wormhole’s two mouths. With this kind of coupling, operating on the particles on one side would induce changes to the particles on the other, perhaps propping open the wormhole between them. “Could it be that that makes the wormhole traversable?” Jafferis recalls wondering. Having been fascinated by wormholes since childhood — a physics prodigy, he started at Yale University at 14 — Jafferis pursued the question “almost for fun.”
Introduction

Back at Harvard, he and Ping Gao, his graduate student at the time, and Aron Wall, then a visiting researcher, eventually calculated that, indeed, by coupling two sets of entangled particles, you can perform an operation on the left-hand set that, in the dual, higher-dimensional space-time picture, holds open the wormhole leading to the right-hand mouth and pushes a qubit through.

Jafferis, Gao and Wall’s 2016 discovery of this holographic, traversable wormhole gave researchers a new window into the mechanics of holography. “The fact that if you do the right things from the outside you can end up getting through, it also means you can see inside” the wormhole, Jafferis said. “It means that it’s possible to probe this fact that two entangled systems get described by some connected geometry.”

Within months, Maldacena and two colleagues had built on the scheme by showing that the traversable wormhole could be realized in a simple setting — “a quantum system that’s simple enough that we can imagine making it,” Jafferis said.

The SYK model, as it’s called, is a system of matter particles that interact in groups, rather than the usual pairs. [my bolding]

Connecting the dots, Maldacena and co-authors proposed that two SYK models linked together could encode the two mouths of Jafferis, Gao and Wall’s traversable wormhole. Jafferis and Gao ran with the approach. By 2019, they found their way to a concrete prescription for teleporting a qubit of information from one system of four-way-interacting particles to another. Rotating all the particles’ spin directions translates, in the dual space-time picture, into a negative-energy shock wave that sweeps through the wormhole, kicking the qubit forward and, at a predictable time, out of the mouth.

“Jafferis’ wormhole is the first concrete realization of ER = EPR, where he shows the relation holds exactly for a particular system,” said Alex Zlokapa, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-author on the new experiment.

In the comments a reply from Lubos Motl, to a criticical post about the article...

It's been basically certain since 2012 that any entangled physical systems represent a non-traversable wormhole of a Planckian radius - they are strictly speaking physically the same - and by this paper, the minimal statement has made several additional steps, by increasing the number of qubits, by making sure that the Hamiltonian is well-defined through the dual (which is also an exact physical equivalent that must be identified) of the SYK model, and equivalent to a wormhole in a well-known spacetime, and by adding an interaction (breaking the Lorentz symmetry of the pre-existing spacetime) that makes the wormhole traversable.

The physical equivalent of that wormhole was created using the Google qubits. One may prefer a more direct language or a tamed one but if you deny that similar statements are justified by pretty much well-established scientific results, you are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

There is little doubt in my mind, that [only] matching [classical] patterns can be shared [non-classically], and that this is key to understanding the origination of all experience, and also sadly our condition... because the converse is true, patterns that do not match cannot be shared. This is a very deep concept, and when studied, much of the richness (and limitation) of our experience pours out of what appears on the surface, to be a trivially simple concept.

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/physi...m-computer

Link to the Caltech press release...

An additional video related to this paper...

Here is a more cynical analysis!

https://www.johnhorgan.org/blog/posts/41998

https://inqnet.caltech.edu/wormhole2022/

Q&A from the research team... to help iron out any misunderstandings about what they are/are not claiming...

https://inqnet.caltech.edu/wormhole2022/

Q&A from the research team... to help iron out any misunderstandings about what they are/are not claiming...

Do you seriously believe that someone like Professor Woit of Columbia University has misunderstandings that need help from anyone?

We are in an age of physics hype because there really isn't much fundamentally going on.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Surely the difference between a simulation and the real thing is too obvious to need explaining?

There seems to be a lot of madness about nowadays, so I guess we will see a lot more of this.

My hunch is that Quantum Computing is going to be a technology that never quite makes it, and is ultimately forgotten about.

Do you seriously believe that someone like Professor Woit of Columbia University has misunderstandings that need help from anyone?

We are in an age of physics hype because there really isn't much fundamentally going on.

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Surely the difference between a simulation and the real thing is too obvious to need explaining?

There seems to be a lot of madness about nowadays, so I guess we will see a lot more of this.

My hunch is that Quantum Computing is going to be a technology that never quite makes it, and is ultimately forgotten about.

I doubt the papers authors have taken much (if any) notice of Woit's blog... Quanta Magazine did sensationalise their article's original title, which Quanta have now altered by adding the term 'holographic'... but Quanta's hype has nothing to do with the papers authors...

I'm absolutely happy that entanglement is equivalent to a non-classical wormhole, and have been for years. I'm also happy with the idea that this experiment is a simulation. But wouldn't agree that their experiment is the equivalent of a simulation on a classical computer, it's far deeper than that, it's a deep philosophical issue that applies to other similar quantum mechanical experimental results. I'm disinterested in the gravitational claims for my purposes.

My main interest is the extra steps they came up with for the sparse design of their dual model experiment, how these are interpreted, and obviously their result. Which are really important.

I doubt the papers authors have taken much (if any) notice of Woit's blog... Quanta Magazine did sensationalise their article's original title, which Quanta have now altered by adding the term 'holographic'... but Quanta's hype has nothing to do with the papers authors...

I think Quanta would not want to misrepresent the views of senior scientists provided they are clearly stated.

I'm absolutely happy that entanglement is equivalent to a non-classical wormhole, and have been for years. I'm also happy with the idea that this experiment is a simulation. But wouldn't agree that their experiment is the equivalent of a simulation on a classical computer, it's far deeper than that, it's a deep philosophical issue that applies to other similar quantum mechanical experimental results. I'm disinterested in the gravitational claims for my purposes.

Well whether it is or not, is hard to say, since no real wormhole has even been shown to exist!

My main interest is the extra steps they came up with for the sparse design of their dual model experiment, how these are interpreted, and obviously their result. Which are really important.

Since the QC only contains 9 Q-bits, whatever it calculates could be presumably done more easily with a classical computer. If that is true, it reduces this experiment to the level of a stunt. This is exactly the accusation that Woit and others are making.

Woit's blog is widely read, and he spotted years ago that String Theory was going nowhere, and was making bogus claims that it was a testable science.