Friday, October 11, 2024

A simulated wormhole using a quantum computer – Physics and Mathematics

The theoretical behavior of a wormhole, that is, a tunnel in space-time, has been explored: it is not physically created, but its dynamics have been studied thanks to a quantum computer that simulated two black holes and then sent a message between them through a ‘shortcut’. in spacetime. This is the first experiment of its kind designed to investigate the possibility of quantum gravity, a theory that unites gravity and quantum physics, two fundamental and well-studied descriptions of nature that seem fundamentally incompatible with each other. studio published in Nature from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Google Quantum AI and Fermilab.

Wormholes are bridges between two distant regions in space-time. They had never before been observed experimentally, but scientists have been theorizing about their existence for nearly a century. In 1935, they were described by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen as tunnels through space-time, and thus referred to as ‘Einstein-Rosen bridges’, while the term ‘wormhole’ was coined in the 1950s by physicist John Wheeler.

Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind proposed the idea that wormholes and quantum physics, particularly entanglement (a phenomenon in which two particles can remain connected over large distances), might be relevant in 2013. Aaron Wall expanded the concept to include wormholes that could be traversed by one end. to a party. The researchers show that this gravitational description of a traversable wormhole is equivalent to quantum teleportation, a phenomenon that has previously been demonstrated experimentally with information transmitted over long distances via optical fibers and through the air.

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The new experiment did more than explore the equivalence of wormholes with quantum teleportation, and investigated the idea that information traveling from one point to another in space could be described in the language of gravity (wormholes) or in the language of quantum physics (quantum. entanglement).

The experiment was conducted on a copy of the Google Sycamore 2 computer, which has 72 qubits. Of these, only nine were used to reduce the amount of interference and noise in the system. “This work represents a step toward a larger program to test quantum gravitational physics using a quantum computer,” concluded Maria Spiropoulou of Caltech.

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