Description:

A wormhole, as first described by Einstein and Rosen in 1935, is a shortcut between two points in space. In 2016 Gao, Jafferis, and Wall showed that wormholes can in principle be made traversable, while in 2013 Maldacena and Susskind proposed a holographic duality between traversable wormholes and quantum teleportation. Since quantum teleportation is a phenomenon that can be, and has been, created in the laboratory, this implied the exciting possibility of observing the dynamics of traversable wormholes in laboratory experiments. The first successful experiment of this type was performed in January 2022 using a Google Sycamore quantum processor, and is described in a recent paper in Nature. In this experiment the spatial degree of freedom “through the wormhole” has no relation to ordinary space in the lab; instead it is an emergent property of the dynamics of quantum entanglement. Future experiments along these lines can explore some of the most interesting questions of quantum gravity.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3

Dr. Joseph Lykken, Fermilab

Host: Ian Low