They teleport qubits through a simulated wormhole using a sycamore quantum processor

If you think so Entanglement of qubits using the Fibonacci sequence It was confusing, you better hold on to something. A team of physicists recently discovered that quantum systems can simulate wormholes, theoretical shortcuts in space-time where systems allow instant transit of information between distant locations.

The research team believes their findings could have implications for the study of quantum gravity, the general term used to pair quantum mechanics and Newtonian gravity, which does not affect quantum particles the way classical objects do. was the investigation published in nature.

“The relationship between quantum entanglement, space-time, and quantum gravity is one of the most important questions in fundamental physics and an active area of ​​theoretical research,” said Maria Spiropolou, a Caltech physicist and lead author of the paper. The study in press release. “We’re excited to be taking this small step to test these ideas on quantum devices and will move forward.”

Let’s go by the parts. To be clear, the researchers did not literally send quantum information through a rip in space-time, which could theoretically connect two separate regions of space-time. (Imagine folding a sheet of paper and sticking a pencil through the two layers. The paper is spacetime, and now you have a portal between two very far away regions.)

One idea put forth in theoretical physics is that wormholes are equivalent to quantum entanglement, which Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” This means that even at large distances, entangled quantum particles are determined by the spins of each of them. Because quantum particles have this unique connection, they make an excellent test bed for teleportation.

in 2017Another team showed that the way theoretical wormholes are described in space-time by gravity is equivalent to quantum information transmission. The newest team was looking into the problem themselves. for some years. They wanted to show that not only is the relationship parabolic, but that the information transmitted can be described by gravity or against quantum entanglement. To do this, the researchers used Google’s Sycamore quantum processor.

“We’ve performed a kind of quantum teleportation equivalent of a traversable wormhole in gravitational form,” Aleksandr Zlokaba, an MIT graduate student and part of the team, said in the release. “To do this, we had to simplify the quantum system to the smallest example that would preserve the properties of gravity so we could implement it on Google’s Sycamore quantum processor.”

The team put a qubit (quantum bit) into a special quantum system and monitored the information coming from another system. According to their study, the information they provided in one quantum system traveled through the quantum equivalent of a wormhole to exit the other system.

The researchers said that the teleportation of quantum information was at the same time what would be expected from the perspective of quantum physics and from the understanding of gravity of how an object travels through a wormhole.

The team plans to build more complex quantum systems to test how the transmission of quantum information might change in a more complex experimental setup. It’s been 87 years since Einstein and his colleagues first described wormholes. Physicists may have cracked this interdimensional egg before the idea was 100 years old.