Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

A holographic wormhole traversed in a quantum computer

A system of nine quantum bits has been used to simulate a state known as a holographic wormhole, a concept that features in attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity.
  1. Adam R. Brown

    1. Adam R. Brown is at X, Mountain View, California 94043, USA, and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, California.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Leonard Susskind

    1. Leonard Susskind is at X, Mountain View, California 94043, USA, and the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, California.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

The holographic principle is a guide in our quest to understand how to combine the two most celebrated theories of modern physics — quantum mechanics and general relativity. According to this principle, theories that include both quantum mechanics and gravity can be exactly equivalent to other theories that involve quantum mechanics but not gravity. Such an alternative description is known as a dual, and has fewer dimensions than its gravitational counterpart — much like how a hologram projected on a 2D surface displays a 3D image. Writing in Nature, Jafferis et al.1 report using a quantum computer to generate a state that mimics a hologram whose dual is an entity known as a wormhole, and then evolving this state to simulate a message traversing the wormhole.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 612, 41-42 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03832-z

References

  1. Jafferis, D. et al. Nature 612, 51–55 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Einstein, A. & Rosen, N. Phys. Rev. 48, 73–77 (1935).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Einstein, A., Podolsky, B. & Rosen, N. Phys. Rev. 47, 777–780 (1935).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Maldacena, J. & Susskind, L. Fortschr. Phys. 61, 781–811 (2013).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Susskind, L. Fortschr. Phys. 64, 551–564 (2016).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Gao, P., Jafferis, D. L. & Wall, A. C. J. High Energ. Phys. 2017, 151 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Maldacena, J., Stanford, D. & Yang, Z. Fortsch. Phys. 65, 1700034 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Brown, A. R. et al. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1911.06314 (2019).

  9. Gao, P. & Jafferis, D. L. J. High Energ. Phys. 2021, 97 (2021).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Shapoval, I., Su, V. P., de Jong, W., Urbanek, M. & Swingle, B. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.14081 (2022).

Download references

Competing Interests

We have appointments at X, which is part of Alphabet; this is the same parent company that owns Google’s quantum-computing division, where the second and seventh authors work. Additionally, the authors described their results to us in a video meeting, after the paper had been through one round of review, and we gave general feedback; they have acknowledged this input in their paper.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links