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arXiv:2605.13241

No chaos required: traversable wormhole signals survive 98% coupling deletion

Sagar Dubey

quant-phhep-thSubmitted May 13, 2026• Announced May 14, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The traversable wormhole protocol in coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) systems produces a transmission signal C(t) widely interpreted as evidence of holographic dynamics. Recent work has questioned this interpretation, showing that similar signals arise in generic thermalizing systems. We address what the signal actually probes by systematically destroying quantum chaos in the SYK model via random coupling deletion, while monitoring the transmission signal across the chaos-to-integrable transition. Using exact diagonalization of the doubled SYK model at N=10 with 50 disorder realizations per sparsity, supplemented by Krylov-subspace extensions to N=20, we find that the ensemble-averaged peak height varies by less than 1.1% across a 50-fold sparsification range, even as the underlying spectrum transitions from Gaussian-unitary-ensemble to sub-Poisson statistics. A 1,200-instance sweep over the inter-system coupling mu confirms that the signal is controlled by mu alone, with no dependence on internal chaos. We further verify that the thermofield double state retains its thermal structure under sparsification despite substantial changes to the state vector, providing a structural explanation for the invariance. These results indicate that the transmission signal diagnoses inter-system coupling fidelity rather than holographic dynamics, and that future quantum-simulation experiments require independent chaos diagnostics to substantiate gravitational claims. As a practical consequence, the invariance implies that 98% of the Hamiltonian's coupling terms can be discarded (with variance rescaling of the survivors), reducing the gate count per Trotter step by approximately 50x at N=10 and bringing larger traversable-wormhole simulations within experimental reach.

Comments
12 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

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The traversable wormhole protocol in coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) systems produces a transmission signal C(t) widely interpreted as evidence of holographic dynamics. Recent work has questioned this interpretation, showing that similar signals arise in generic thermalizing systems. We address what the signal actually probes by systematically destroying quantum chaos in the SYK model via random coupling deletion, while monitoring the transmission signal across the chaos-to-integrable transition. Using exact diagonalization of the doubled SYK model at N=10 with 50 disorder realizations per sparsity, supplemented by Krylov-subspace extensions to N=20, we find that the ensemble-averaged peak height varies by less than 1.1% across a 50-fold sparsification range, even as the underlying spectrum transitions from Gaussian-unitary-ensemble to sub-Poisson statistics. A 1,200-instance sweep over the inter-system coupling mu confirms that the signal is controlled by mu alone, with no dependence on internal chaos. We further verify that the thermofield double state retains its thermal structure under sparsification despite substantial changes to the state vector, providing a structural explanation for the invariance. These results indicate that the transmission signal diagnoses inter-system coupling fidelity rather than holographic dynamics, and that future quantum-simulation experiments require independent chaos diagnostics to substantiate gravitational claims. As a practical consequence, the invariance implies that 98% of the Hamiltonian's coupling terms can be discarded (with variance rescaling of the survivors), reducing the gate count per Trotter step by approximately 50x at N=10 and bringing larger traversable-wormhole simulations within experimental reach.
Abstract We investigate two sparse Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) systems coupled by a bilinear term as a holographic quantum mechanical description of an eternal traversable wormhole in the low temperature limit. Each SYK system consists of N Majorana fermions coupled by random q-body interactions. The degree of sparseness is captured by a regular hypergraph in such a way that the Hamiltonian contains exactly k N independent terms. We improve on the theoretical understanding of the sparseness property by using known measures of hypergraph expansion. We show that the sparse version of the two coupled SYK model is gapped with a ground state close to a thermofield double state. Using Krylov subspace and parallelization techniques, we simulate the system for q = 4 and q = 8. The sparsity of the model allows us to explore larger values of N than the ones existing in the literature for the all-to-all SYK. We analyze in detail the two-point functions and the transmission amplitude of signals between the two systems. We identify a range of parameters where revivals obey the scaling predicted by holography and signals can be interpreted as traversing the wormhole.
The realization of holographic duality on near-term intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware requires identifying sparse Hamiltonians that retain essential gravitational features. While previous approaches rely on machine-learning optimization to find such models, we demonstrate that simple magnitude-based pruning of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model preserves holographic transport at sparsities ≈5%. By mapping the phase diagram of sparsified SYK (N ≤ 12), we identify a distinct phase boundary where quantum chaos, diagnosed via the Spectral Form Factor (SFF), dissolves, even while traversable wormhole signatures persist. This decoupling suggests that information scrambling can occur without the emergent geometry required for gravity. We validate the gravitational phenomenon of the chaotic phase by observing a quantized Shapiro time delay in the teleportation signal with perturbation, consistent with the emergence of bulk geometry. Finally, we show that this robustness is unique to all-to-all connectivity. Imposing linear local geometry destroys the holographic phase, highlighting non-locality as critical for quantum gravity simulations.
We report the experimental signature of holographically motivated quantum teleportation on a quantum processor, driven by the highly entangled, chaotic dynamics of a many-body system. Specifically, we implement the traversable-wormhole (TW) protocol utilizing a \textit{chaotic} binary sparse N=8N = 8N=8 Sachdev--Ye--Kitaev (SYK) model. This optimized approach dramatically reduces circuit depth for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware while rigorously preserving the spectral chaos required for gravitational duality. Diagnosing the teleportation signal via mutual information, we find that while inherent noise in NISQ hardware precludes perfect quantitative agreement with exact numerical simulations, our experimental results provide evidence for the essential qualitative signature: a sign-dependent asymmetry. This work establishes a practical framework for holographic quantum simulations, offering a novel empirical testbed for exploring holographic quantum gravity.
It has been recently proposed by Maldacena and Qi that an eternal traversable wormhole in a two-dimensional anti--de Sitter space is the gravity dual of the low temperature limit of two Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models coupled by a relevant interaction (which we will refer to as spin operator). We study spectral and eigenstate properties of this coupled SYK model. We find that level statistics in the tail of the spectrum, and for a sufficiently weak coupling, show substantial deviations from random matrix theory, which suggests that traversable wormholes are not quantum chaotic. By contrast, for sufficiently strong coupling, corresponding to the black hole phase, level statistics are well described by random matrix theory. This transition in level statistics coincides approximately with a previously reported Hawking-Page transition for weak coupling. We show explicitly that this thermodynamic transition turns into a sharp crossover as the coupling increases. Likewise, this critical coupling also corresponds to the one at which the overlap between the ground state and the thermofield double state (TFD) is smallest. In the range of sizes we can reach by exact diagonalization, the ground state is well approximated by the TFD only in the strong coupling limit. This is due to the fact that the ground state is close to the eigenstate of the spin operator corresponding to the lowest eigenvalue which is an exact TFD at infinite temperature. In this region, the spectral density is separated into blobs centered around the eigenvalues of the spin operator. For weaker couplings, the exponential decay of coefficients in a tensor product basis, typical of the TFD, becomes power law. Finally, we also find that the total Hamiltonian has an additional discrete symmetry which has not been reported previously.
We implement the Wormhole-Inspired Teleportation Protocol (WITP) in a pair of coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models prepared in a thermofield-double state, forming a quantum analog of a traversable wormhole. By varying parameters (temperature $\ensuremath{\beta}$, coupling strength ggg, insertion site, and traversal time ttt) we compare the teleportation fidelity against an analogous protocol using a transverse-field Ising model. We find that the chaotic SYK system consistently yields higher teleportation fidelity than the transverse field Ising model, reflecting the SYK Hamiltonian's pronounced many-body chaos. These enhanced fidelities arise from the SYK's effectively random-matrix dynamics, which improve the coherent information transfer through the wormhole channel. Unlike prior single-qubit benchmarks based on $|0\ensuremath{\rangle}$ inputs, the present work defines and evaluates a genuine quantum-state fidelity for a maximally entangled two-qubit Bell input, using a Pauli-stabilizer formalism that captures entanglement-phase coherence. Our central result is achieved by teleporting a maximally entangled two-qubit Bell state through the wormhole. We introduce a Pauli-stabilizer fidelity measure for the two-qubit message and demonstrate that the Bell-state protocol produces a substantial fidelity boost compared to single-qubit teleportation. Furthermore, we examine the time-resolved fidelity for both single-qubit and two-qubit messages, revealing distinct fluctuation patterns that deepen our understanding of dynamical many-body teleportation processes. Finally, we present an argument that our Bell-state WITP simulations provide a concrete numerical testbed for aspects of the ER = EPR conjecture, by mapping entanglement structure and thermal/coupling dependence to traversability diagnostics in an emergent wormhole geometry.
A pair of identical Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models with bilinear coupling forms a quantum dual of a traversable wormhole, with a ground state close to the so called thermofield double state. We use adiabaticity arguments and numerical simulations to show that the character of the ground state remains unchanged when interaction strengths in the two SYK models become imbalanced. Analysis of thermodynamic and dynamical quantities highlights the key signatures of the wormhole phase in the imbalanced case. Further adiabatic evolution naturally leads to the ``maximally imbalanced'' limit where fermions in a single SYK model are each coupled to a free Majorana zero mode. This limit is interesting because it could be more easily realized using various setups proposed to implement the SYK model in a laboratory. We find, based on numerical studies of the quantum mechanical model, that this limiting case is marginal in that it retains some of the characteristic signatures of the wormhole physics, such as the spectral gap and revival dynamics, but lacks others so that it likely does not represent the full-fledged wormhole dual. We discuss how this scenario could be implemented in the proposed realization of the SYK physics in quantum wires of finite length coupled to a disordered quantum dot.