Washington: Researchers have shown that by creating two entangled black holes, then pulling them apart, they formed a wormhole-essentially a "shortcut" through the universe-connecting the distant black holes.
Now an MIT physicist has found that, looked at through the lens of string theory, the creation of two entangled quarks-the building blocks of matter-simultaneously gives rise to a wormhole connecting the pair.
The theoretical results bolster the relatively new and exciting idea that the laws of gravity holding together the universe may not be fundamental, but arise from something else: quantum entanglement.
Julian Sonner, a senior postdoc in MIT`s Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Center for Theoretical Physics, said that there are some hard questions of quantum gravity we still don`t understand, and we`ve been banging our heads against these problems for a long time, asserting that they need to find the right inroads to understanding these questions.
Sonner mapped the entangled quarks onto a four-dimensional space, considered a representation of space-time. In contrast, gravity is thought to exist in the next dimension as, according to Albert Einstein`s laws, it acts to "bend" and shape space-time, thereby existing in the fifth dimension.
To see what geometry may emerge in the fifth dimension from entangled quarks in the fourth, Sonner employed holographic duality, a concept in string theory. While a hologram is a two-dimensional object, it contains all the information necessary to represent a three-dimensional view. Essentially, holographic duality is a way to derive a more complex dimension from the next lowest dimension.
Using holographic duality, Sonner derived the entangled quarks, and found that what emerged was a wormhole connecting the two, implying that the creation of quarks simultaneously creates a wormhole.
The study has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
