Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor

The holographic principle, theorized to be a property of quantum gravity, postulates that the description of a volume of space can be encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary. The anti-de Sitter (AdS)/conformal field theory correspondence or duality 1 is the principal example of holography. The Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model of N ≫ 1 Majorana fermions 2 , 3 has features suggesting the existence of a gravitational dual in AdS 2 , and is a new realization of holography 4 – 6 . We invoke the holographic correspondence of the SYK many-body system and gravity to probe the conjectured ER=EPR relation between entanglement and spacetime geometry 7 , 8 through the traversable wormhole mechanism as implemented in the SYK model 9 , 10 . A qubit can be used to probe the SYK traversable wormhole dynamics through the corresponding teleportation protocol 9 . This can be realized as a quantum circuit, equivalent to the gravitational picture in the semiclassical limit of an infinite number of qubits 9 . Here we use learning techniques to construct a sparsified SYK model that we experimentally realize with 164 two-qubit gates on a nine-qubit circuit and observe the corresponding traversable wormhole dynamics. Despite its approximate nature, the sparsified SYK model preserves key properties of the traversable wormhole physics: perfect size winding 11 – 13 , coupling on either side of the wormhole that is consistent with a negative energy shockwave 14 , a Shapiro time delay 15 , causal time-order of signals emerging from the wormhole, and scrambling and thermalization dynamics 16 , 17 . Our experiment was run on the Google Sycamore processor. By interrogating a two-dimensional gravity dual system, our work represents a step towards a program for studying quantum gravity in the laboratory. Future developments will require improved hardware scalability and performance as well as theoretical developments including higher-dimensional quantum gravity duals 18 and other SYK-like models 19 .