Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor

Daniel Jafferis, Alexander Zlokapa, Joseph D. Lykken, David K. Kolchmeyer, Samantha I. Davis, Nikolai Lauk, Hartmut Neven and Maria Spiropulu ()
Additional contact information
Daniel Jafferis: Harvard University
Alexander Zlokapa: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joseph D. Lykken: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
David K. Kolchmeyer: Harvard University
Samantha I. Davis: Caltech
Nikolai Lauk: Caltech
Hartmut Neven: Google Quantum AI
Maria Spiropulu: Caltech

Nature, 2022, vol. 612, issue 7938, 51-55

Abstract: Abstract 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 duality1 is the principal example of holography. The Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model of N ≫ 1 Majorana fermions2,3 has features suggesting the existence of a gravitational dual in AdS2, and is a new realization of holography4–6. We invoke the holographic correspondence of the SYK many-body system and gravity to probe the conjectured ER=EPR relation between entanglement and spacetime geometry7,8 through the traversable wormhole mechanism as implemented in the SYK model9,10. A qubit can be used to probe the SYK traversable wormhole dynamics through the corresponding teleportation protocol9. This can be realized as a quantum circuit, equivalent to the gravitational picture in the semiclassical limit of an infinite number of qubits9. 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 winding11–13, coupling on either side of the wormhole that is consistent with a negative energy shockwave14, a Shapiro time delay15, causal time-order of signals emerging from the wormhole, and scrambling and thermalization dynamics16,17. 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 duals18 and other SYK-like models19.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3

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