MIT researchers use quantum computing to observe entanglement

Researchers at the Center for Theoretical Physics lead work on testing quantum gravity on a quantum processor.

Julia C. Keller | School of Science

Publication Date:December 1, 2022

For the first time, researchers at MIT, Caltech, Harvard University, and elsewhere sent quantum information across a quantum system in what could be understood as traversing a wormhole. Though this experiment didn’t create a disruption of physical space and time in the way we might understand the term “wormhole” from science fiction, calculations from the experiment showed that qubits traveled from one system of entangled particles to another in a model of gravity. This experiment performed on the Sycamore quantum processor device at Google opens the doors to future experiments with quantum computers to probe ideas from string theory and gravitational physics. 

“Simulating strongly-interacting quantum systems, such as those that arise in quantum gravity, is one of the most exciting applications of quantum computers,” says Daniel Harlow, the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Associate Professor of Physics and a researcher at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) who works with David Kolchemeyer, one of the lead authors of the work. “This is a promising initial step.”