Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor
- Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA (United States)
- Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States); Google Quantum AI, Venice, CA (United States)
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Pasadena, CA (United States)
- Google Quantum AI, Venice, CA (United States)
The holographic principle, theorized to be a property of quantum gravity, postulates that the description of a volume of space can be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary. The anti-de Sitter (AdS)/conformal field theory correspondence or duality is the principal example of holography. The Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model of N >> 1 Majorana fermions has features suggesting the existence of a gravitational dual in AdS2, and is a new realization of holography. Here, we invoke the holographic correspondence of the SYK many-body system and gravity to probe the conjectured ER=EPR relation between entanglement and spacetime geometry through the traversable wormhole mechanism as implemented in the SYK model. A qubit can be used to probe the SYK traversable wormhole dynamics through the corresponding teleportation protocol. This can be realized as a quantum circuit, equivalent to the gravitational picture in the semiclassical limit of an infinite number of qubits. Here we use learning techniques to construct a sparsified SYK model that we experimentally realize with 164 two-qubit gates on a nine-qubit circuit and observe the corresponding traversable wormhole dynamics. Despite its approximate nature, the sparsified SYK model preserves key properties of the traversable wormhole physics: perfect size winding, coupling on either side of the wormhole that is consistent with a negative energy shockwave, a Shapiro time delay, causal time-order of signals emerging from the wormhole, and scrambling and thermalization dynamics. Our experiment was run on the Google Sycamore processor. By interrogating a two-dimensional gravity dual system, our work represents a step towards a program for studying quantum gravity in the laboratory. Future developments will require improved hardware scalability and performance as well as theoretical developments including higher-dimensional quantum gravity duals and other SYK-like models.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359; SC0019219
- OSTI ID:
- 1973600
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-PUB-22-887-QIS; oai:inspirehep.net:2605741
- Journal Information:
- Nature (London), Journal Name: Nature (London) Journal Issue: 7938 Vol. 612; ISSN 0028-0836
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English