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arXiv:2102.01064

Quantum Gravity in the Lab: Teleportation by Size and Traversable Wormholes, Part II

Sepehr Nezami, Henry W. Lin, Adam R. Brown, Hrant Gharibyan, Stefan Leichenauer, Grant Salton, Leonard Susskind, Brian G. Swingle, Michael Walter

Published Feb 1, 2021• 6 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In [1] we discussed how quantum gravity may be simulated using quantum devices and gave a specific proposal -- teleportation by size and the phenomenon of size-winding. Here we elaborate on what it means to do 'Quantum Gravity in the Lab' and how size-winding connects to bulk gravitational physics and traversable wormholes. Perfect size-winding is a remarkable, fine-grained property of the size wavefunction of an operator; we show from a bulk calculation that this property must hold for quantum systems with a nearly-AdS_2 bulk. We then examine in detail teleportation by size in three systems: the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, random matrices, and spin chains, and discuss prospects for realizing these phenomena in near-term quantum devices.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2102.01064

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In [1] we discussed how quantum gravity may be simulated using quantum devices and gave a specific proposal -- teleportation by size and the phenomenon of size-winding. Here we elaborate on what it means to do 'Quantum Gravity in the Lab' and how size-winding connects to bulk gravitational physics and traversable wormholes. Perfect size-winding is a remarkable, fine-grained property of the size wavefunction of an operator; we show from a bulk calculation that this property must hold for quantum systems with a nearly-AdS_2 bulk. We then examine in detail teleportation by size in three systems: the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, random matrices, and spin chains, and discuss prospects for realizing these phenomena in near-term quantum devices.
By leveraging shared entanglement between a pair of qubits, one can teleport a quantum state from one particle to another.Recent advances have uncovered an intrinsically many-body generalization of quantum teleportation, with an elegant and surprising connection to gravity.In particular, the teleportation of quantum information relies on many-body dynamics, which originate from strongly interacting systems that are holographically dual to gravity; from the gravitational perspective, such quantum teleportation can be understood as the transmission of information through a traversable wormhole.Here, we propose and analyze a new mechanism for many-body quantum teleportation-dubbed peaked-size teleportation.Intriguingly, peaked-size teleportation utilizes precisely the same type of quantum circuit as traversable wormhole teleportation yet has a completely distinct microscopic origin: It relies upon the spreading of local operators under generic thermalizing dynamics and not gravitational physics.We demonstrate the ubiquity of peaked-size teleportation, both analytically and numerically, across a diverse landscape of physical systems, including random unitary circuits, the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model (at high temperatures), one-dimensional spin chains, and a bulk theory of gravity with stringy corrections.Our results pave the way toward using many-body quantum teleportation as a powerful experimental tool for (i) characterizing the size distributions of operators in strongly correlated systems and (ii) distinguishing between generic and intrinsically gravitational scrambling dynamics.To this end, we provide a detailed experimental blueprint for realizing many-body quantum teleportation in both trapped ions and Rydberg atom arrays; effects of decoherence and experimental imperfections are analyzed.
With the long-term goal of studying models of quantum gravity in the lab, we propose holographic teleportation protocols that can be readily executed in table-top experiments. These protocols exhibit similar behavior to that seen in the recent traversable wormhole constructions of [1,2]: information that is scrambled into one half of an entangled system will, following a weak coupling between the two halves, unscramble into the other half. We introduce the concept of teleportation by size to capture how the physics of operator-size growth naturally leads to information transmission. The transmission of a signal through a semi-classical holographic wormhole corresponds to a rather special property of the operator-size distribution we call size winding. For more general systems (which may not have a clean emergent geometry), we argue that imperfect size winding is a generalization of the traversable wormhole phenomenon. In addition, a form of signalling continues to function at high temperature and at large times for generic chaotic systems, even though it does not correspond to a signal going through a geometrical wormhole, but rather to an interference effect involving macroscopically different emergent geometries. Finally, we outline implementations feasible with current technology in two experimental platforms: Rydberg atom arrays and trapped ions.
A recent article [Nature 612, 51-55 (2022)] claims to observe traversable wormhole dynamics in an experiment. This claim is based upon performing a teleportation protocol using a Hamiltonian that consists of seven Majorana fermions with five fully-commuting terms. The Hamiltonian is generated via a machine-learning procedure designed to replicate the teleportation behavior of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. The authors claim that the learned Hamiltonian reproduces gravitational dynamics of the SYK model and demonstrates gravitational teleportation through an emergent wormhole. We find: (i) in contrast to these claims, the learned Hamiltonian does not exhibit thermalization; (ii) the teleportation signal only resembles the SYK model for operators that were used in the machine-learning training; (iii) the observed perfect size winding is in fact a generic feature of small-size, fully-commuting models, and does not appear to persist in larger-size fully-commuting models or in non-commuting models at equivalent system sizes
We analyze the well-known Google–Caltech experiment in which the implementation of a traversable wormhole on a quantum computer was claimed. While the experiment constitutes a remarkable technological and conceptual achievement, we argue that, from a strict physical standpoint, what was realized is not a geometric wormhole in spacetime. Rather, the experiment implements a simplified effective Hamiltonian inspired by the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model. This Hamiltonian was obtained through the training of artificial neural networks, yielding a tractable approximation suitable for execution on the quantum hardware of Google, in collaboration with California Institute of Technology. Within the framework of the gauge–gravity conjecture, this simplified SYK-like model admits a dual gravitational interpretation. In this dictionary, the observed quantum dynamics—specifically, quantum teleportation—can be reinterpreted as the traversability of a wormhole in an effective AdS_2 description. We emphasize three key points: first, the full SYK model is far too complex to be implemented directly, and the experiment relies on an AI-assisted effective Hamiltonian capturing only the relevant low-energy features; second, what is directly observed on the quantum computer is quantum teleportation; third, the notion of a traversable wormhole is not accessed directly as a gravitational spacetime geometry, but emerges only as a dual, interpretative description, with the gravitational theory being probed indirectly through quantum mechanics within the gauge–gravity correspondence.
We extend the protocol of Gao and Jafferis arXiv:1911.07416 to allow wormhole teleportation between two entangled copies of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model communicating only through a classical channel. We demonstrate in finite NNN simulations that the protocol exhibits the characteristic holographic features of wormhole teleportation discussed and summarized in Jafferis et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3 . We review and exhibit in detail how these holographic features relate to size winding which, as first shown by Brown et al. arXiv:1911.06314 and Nezami et al. arXiv:2102.01064, encodes a dual description of wormhole teleportation.