Can quantum circuits have something to do with wormholes?

Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, is featured in an article in last week’s Tuesday Science section of the New York Times about teleporting qubits through what might be described as a wormhole. The article says that physicists such as she

like to compare the teleportation process to two cups of tea. Drop a cube of sugar into one teacup, and it promptly dissolves—then, after a tick of the quantum clock, the cube reappears intact in the other teacup.

Today (yesterday? tomorrow? years ago?—with a quantum clock, does it matter?) we ask what the paper referenced in the NYT story might really be about. This is after trying to work through a lot of hype and pushback.

The first trouble is that we cannot tick a real quantum clock quite yet. But Spiropulu and her group were able to simulate a quantum clock via using a quantum computer. The group comprises: first author Daniel Jafferis, then Alexander Zlokapa, Joseph Lykken, David Kolchmeyer, Samantha Davis, Nikolai Lauk, Hartmut Neven, and then Spiropulu. Their paper was just reported in Nature. The whole buzz makes us recall an exchange that never took place:

Albert Einstein: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”

Woody Allen: “[If] everything is an illusion and nothing exists, [then] I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

The Quantum Experiment

Spiropulu’s group could not build a quantum experiment to directly test this kind of teleportation. At least it seemed like that would be impossible. But they cleverly used the Sycamore chip developed by Google in 2019. It uses a type of quantum computing called superconducting qubits, which send electric currents flowing through superconducting materials to store and process information. Google created the chip to study “quantum supremacy” as we covered three years ago. A wonderful article on Medium by Jonathan Hui runs helpful commentary around circuit diagrams of the processor from the Google team’s original paper. Hui says:

Regardless of other claims, Google’s processor is a significant milestone because it demonstrates a problem with some real value. Whether classical computers will take 100,000 years or 2.5 days for the pseudo-random generator, this kind of speed improvement is rarely or never demonstrated with a general-purpose quantum computer.

What we find significant is that Google’s processor is not limited to the pseudo-randomness application to demonstrate what we’ll call advantage. It has plug-and-play capabilities. Google may not have created Sycamore to study quantum teleportation. But it was possible to exploit its quantum ability to demonstrate teleportation. See their Nature paper for how.

Wormholes and Their Duals

The NYT story and an article by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta have some pithy quotes from people well-known to us:

• John Preskill, about ‘the evolving system of qubits in the Sycamore chip’: “[It] has this really cool alternative description. You can think of the system in a very different language as being gravitational.”
• Leonard Susskind: “The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”
• Scott Aaronson: “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.” (See also Scott’s post here.)

These quotes allude to a duality, both ends of which connect Einstein and the Israeli-American phys