Scientists create simulated wormholes

In science fiction, wormholes in the cosmos serve as portals through spacetime through which spacecraft can traverse unimaginable distances with ease. Scientists have long sought a deeper understanding of this phenomenon in the universe and announced this Wednesday (30) that they managed to create two tiny black holes simulated in a quantum computer and transmitted messages between them through the equivalent of a tunnel. in space-time. The feat was achieved with a “baby wormhole,” said Caltech University physicist Maria Spiropulu, co-author of research published in the journal Nature. But humanity is still a long way from being able to send people or other living beings using portals like this one, she said. “Experimentally, for me, I’ll say it’s a long, long way off. People come up to me and say, ‘Can you put your dog in the wormhole?’ So no,” joked Spiropulu, when answering questions from journalists. “But that’s a big leap.” “There is a difference between something being possible in theory and possible in reality,” added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, the US laboratory for particle physics and accelerators. “So you can sit around and send your dog down a wormhole. But we have to start somewhere. And I think it’s just exciting that we can get our hands on this.” The researchers observed the dynamics of the wormhole, simulated on a Google quantum device called the Sycamore quantum processor. Wormhole – a rupture in space and time – is a phenomenon that acts as a bridge between two remote regions of the universe. Scientists refer to them as Einstein-Rosen bridges, named after the two physicists who described them – Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. These wormholes are consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which focuses on gravity, one of the fundamental forces in the universe. The term wormhole was coined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s. Spiropulu said the researchers had found a quantum system that exhibited the key properties of a gravitational wormhole, but was small enough to be implemented on existing quantum hardware. . “That’s what we can say at this point: that we have something that, in terms of the properties that we observe, looks like a wormhole,” Lykken said. The researchers further stated that no ruptures of space and time were created in physical space in the experiment, although a traversable wormhole appears to have arisen based on teleported quantum information, using quantum codes in the processor. “These ideas have been around for a long time and are very powerful,” said Lykken. “But at the end of the day, we’re in experimental science and struggling for a long time to find a way to explore these ideas in the lab. And that’s what’s really exciting. It’s not just, ‘Well, wormholes are cool.’ a way to really look at these fundamental problems of our universe in a laboratory setting.” *Reproduction of this content is prohibited.

Agência Brasil