Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor*

In 2016 Gao, Jafferis, and Wall showed that wormholes can in principle be made traversable, while in 2013 Maldacena and Susskind proposed a holographic duality between traversable wormholes and quantum teleportation. In 2017 Maldacena, Stanford, and Yang proposed that the holographic features of the SYK model offer a realizable example of traversable wormhole dynamics, and in 2019 Gao and Jafferis presented an explict protocol for wormhole teleportation using two copies of the SYK model. The first successful realization of wormhole teleportation using this protocol was performed in 2022 using a Google Sycamore quantum processor, and is described in Nature 612, 51–55 (2022). As verified in a classical computer simulation, this system exhibits characteristic features of wormhole dynamics not shared by generic many-body teleportation. In this experiment the spatial degree of freedom "through the wormhole" has no relation to ordinary space in the lab; instead it is an emergent property of the dynamics of quantum entanglement. More recent developments include the possibility of adapting the protocol to allow long-range wormhole teleportation.