Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor
Creators
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1.
Harvard University
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2.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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3.
California Institute of Technology
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4.
Google (United States)
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5.
Fermilab
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 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. 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.
Copyright and License
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
Acknowledgement
The experiment was performed in collaboration with the Google Quantum AI hardware team, under the direction of A. Megrant, J. Kelly and Y. Chen. We acknowledge the work of the team in fabricating and packaging the processor; building and outfitting the cryogenic and control systems; executing baseline calibrations; optimizing processor performance and providing the tools to execute the experiment. Specialized device calibration methods were developed by the physics team led by V. Smelyanskiy. We in particular thank X. Mi and P. Roushan for their technical support in carrying out the experiment and are grateful to B. Kobrin for useful discussions and validation studies. This work is supported by the Department of Energy Office of High Energy Physics QuantISED programme grant no. SC0019219 on Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics. Furthermore, A.Z. acknowledges support from the Hertz Foundation, the Department of Defense through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program, and Caltech’s Intelligent Quantum Networks and Technologies research programme. S.I.D. is partially supported by the Brinson Foundation. Fermilab is operated by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under contract number DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the United States Department of Energy. We are grateful to A. Kitaev, J. Preskill, L. Susskind, P. Hayden, A. Brown, S. Nezami, J. Maldacena, N. Yao, K. Thorne and D. Gross for insightful discussions and comments that helped us improve the manuscript. We are also grateful to graduate student O. Cerri for the error analysis of the experimental data. M.S. thanks the members of the QCCFP (Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics) QuantISED Consortium and acknowledges P. Dieterle for the thorough inspection of the manuscript.
Supplemental Material
See attached - This file contains Supplementary Sections 1–7 including Figs. 1–36 and References: see the Contents for details.
Errata
See attached -
04 April 2025: A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08788-4
Files
41586_2022_5424_MOESM1_ESM.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 117895
- DOI
- 10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20221117-173105698
Related works
- Featured in
- Caltech News: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/physicists-observe-wormhole-dynamics-using-a-quantum-computer (URL)
- Is corrected by
- Erratum: 10.1038/s41586-025-08788-4 (DOI)
- Is supplement to
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/c0Kd5 (URL)
Funding
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- SC-0019219
- Fannie and John Hertz Foundation
- National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship
- INtelligent Quantum NEtworks and Technologies (INQNET)
- Brinson Foundation
- Department of Energy (DOE)
- DE-AC02-07CH11359
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- INQNET , Physics Department
- Publication Status
- Published