A quantum wormhole was created by a team of physicists led by Maria Spiropulu of CalTech. But this was not a wormhole in spacetime, but a quantum holographic wormhole created inside a quantum computer.
The two main theories that describe the universe are Quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, and General relativity, the physics of the very large. The fundamental problem is the lack of compatibility between these two theories.
Einstein along with Nathan Rosen, in attempting to create a unified theory of quantum gravity, published the ER paper. They developed the concept of a certain type of a wormhole called an Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridge, which consists of the extreme spacetime of two black holes connected via their singularities in a tube-like structure of spacetime.
At about the same time, Einstein, Rosen and Boris Podolsky published the EPR paper, in which they argued that quantum mechanics is incomplete because of something called quantum entanglement, where an apparent exchange of information occurs faster than the speed of light. This is forbidden in relativity theory.
In 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena asked the question, what if two entangled particles very far apart were exchanging information instantly because they were connected via a wormhole? Later he showed that a system involving two sets of entangled particles was mathematically equivalent to two black holes connected via a Wormhole.
Maldecena along with physicist Leonard Susskind proposed the “ER = EPR” conjecture, suggesting that entangled particles are connected via a wormhole. So by creating a configuration of entangled particles, we are also creating something equivalent to a wormhole. This is the basis of the claim in the recent paper about how a wormhole was created in a lab using a quantum computer.
How was this wormhole created? According to general relativity, when anything with mass or energy is introduced into a wormhole, it’s gravitational effect immediately closes it. in order to keep a wormhole open, some form of negative energy is needed to provide a force against the gravitational collapse. Negative energy or mass is something not considered physically possible. But this is not the case in our quantum system. Negative energy can be simulated by manipulating the electrical field to change the spin direction of the qubits.
The researchers created an entangled state between two sides of a quantum system using 7 qubits, consisting of 7 pairs of entangled particles. One set of particles acted as the entrance of the wormhole and the other entangled set acted as the exit of the wormhole. Two more maximally entangled qubits were used in this experiment, bringing the total to 9. One of these qubits is called a “probe” and the other is called a “reference.” The probe was swapped out with a particle located at the entrance of the wormhole. That probe’s possible states then quickly got entangled with the states of the other particles at the entrance, spreading or scattering its information among them. This is roughly analogous to a particle entering the mouth of a wormhole. Next the experimenters changed the electric field to simulate negative energy to keep the wormhole open.
The scrambled information from the probe was then transferred to the exit of the wormhole consisting of the 7 particles on the other side. And then it unscrambled and focused on a single particle at the exit side of the wormhole. The researchers confirmed that information was transferred by measuring the amount of entanglement between the reference qubit and the particle at the exit. The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled.
In principle, if they had two quantum computers on opposites sides of earth, a refined version of this experiment should be able to transmit quantum information from one side to the other.
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This is a quantum mechanical simulation of a wormhole and not a real wormhole in spacetime. We are still far away from creating a wormhole in spacetime. They are just mathematically equivalent.
