Sometimes wormholes are lumpy
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What happens if two black holes are connected by an unbreakable quantum bond? Calculations show that this could lead to a bumpy spacetime a tunnel called the Einstein-Rosen caterpillar.
The name Albert Einstein brings together two very different physical oddities: the first is called the Einstein-Rosen bridge. worm-holeor a tunnel connecting distant points in space-time, and the second is known as an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair, in which two particles are connected by an inseparable property called quantum entanglement. In 2013Physicists Juan Maldacena of Princeton University in New Jersey and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University in California have suggested that when it comes to black holes, they may be equivalent.
Now, Brian Swingle from Brandeis University in Massachusetts and his colleagues found that this may only be true in some cases. They mathematically analyzed a collection of entangled black holes and found that the situation is more complex and jagged than previously thought.
Swingle says studying wormholes connecting quantum entangled black holes ultimately helps researchers better understand the insides of black holes, which are poorly understood places full of mystery because of how strongly gravity acts there. Mathematical models show that the size of a black hole's interior corresponds to its complexity—how complex it is at the level of its most basic quantum building blocks. The researchers wondered whether a similar rule existed for wormholes connecting a pair of black holes.
This is a difficult task because a complete theory will be needed to fully understand the entanglement of black holes. quantum gravitywhich physicists have not yet formulated. Instead, the team used a model that loosely links quantum physics and gravity, but which should resemble reality enough to still offer valuable information, Swingle says.
He and his colleagues discovered a mathematical correspondence between the amount of microscopic quantum randomness contained in a wormhole and its geometric length. Their calculations showed that a typical wormhole is less likely to be smooth and more likely to contain several protrusions of matter, a feature that has led it to be compared to a caterpillar. Swingle says this is different from the 2013 result, which may apply to special, and therefore less common, cases where the entangled state of black holes resulted in a smooth wormhole forming between them.
Donald Marolf from the University of California, Santa Barbara, say the new work sheds light on entangled black holes, but still does not describe the most common case of such entanglement. He says the set of all theoretically possible states for a black hole is quite large—larger than all the black holes that exist in our universe—and more theoretical research will be needed to definitively say what type of bound state a pair of black holes is most likely to adopt.
One part of this future research may involve the use of quantum computers as simulators cosmic black holes and wormhole caterpillars, says Swingle. Because his team's approach involved combining simplified quantum theory and gravity theory once quantum computers became more powerful and reliable They can be used to learn more about both quantum theory and new ideas about gravity, he says. The new calculation already uses some elements of quantum information theory, so there could be interesting developments in another direction, where studying the mysteries of gravity will inspire the creation of new quantum computing algorithms, Swingle says.
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