A holographic wormhole traversed in a quantum computer – Nature.com
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Adam R. Brown is at X, Mountain View, California 94043, USA, and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, California.
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Leonard Susskind is at X, Mountain View, California 94043, USA, and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, California.
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The holographic principle is a guide in our quest to understand how to combine the two most celebrated theories of modern physics — quantum mechanics and general relativity. According to this principle, theories that include both quantum mechanics and gravity can be exactly equivalent to other theories that involve quantum mechanics but not gravity. Such an alternative description is known as a dual, and has fewer dimensions than its gravitational counterpart — much like how a hologram projected on a 2D surface displays a 3D image. Writing in Nature, Jafferis et al.1 report using a quantum computer to generate a state that mimics a hologram whose dual is an entity known as a wormhole, and then evolving this state to simulate a message traversing the wormhole.
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Nature 612, 41-42 (2022)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03832-z
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We work for the same parent company as the second and seventh authors. We have an appointment at X, which is Alphabet’s “moonshot factory” (as well as at Stanford). The second and seventh authors have appointments at Google’s quantum-computing division. This is very far away, both geographically and administratively (and they are legally separate entities), but they do all legally belong to the same parent company. On the other hand, we have never worked with any of the authors, and have no plans to. We gave the authors of the paper general feedback when they described their results to us in a video meeting, after the paper had been through one round of review. They have acknowledged us in the paper, presumably for this input.
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Read the paper: Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor
Scrambling of quantum information validated by quantum teleportation
Quantum simulation of fundamental physics
See all News & Views
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