Entanglement = Wormholes

One of the most enjoyable and inspiring physics papers I have read in recent years
is this one by Mark Van Raamsdonk. Building on earlier observations
by Maldacena and by Ryu and Takayanagi. Van Raamsdonk proposed that quantum
entanglement is the fundamental ingredient underlying spacetime geometry.* Since
my first encounter with this provocative paper, I have often mused that it might be a
Good Thing for someone to take Van Raamsdonks idea really seriously.

Now someone has.

I love wormholes. (Who doesnt?) Picture two balls, one here on earth, the other in
the Andromeda galaxy. Its a long trip from one ball to the other on the background
space, but theres a shortcut:You can walk into the ball on earth and moments later
walk out of the ball in Andromeda. Thats a wormhole.

Ive mentioned before that John Wheeler was one of my heros during my formative
years. Back in the 1950s, Wheeler held a passionate belief that everything is
geometry, and one particularly intriguing idea he called charge without charge.
There are no pointlike electric charges, Wheeler proclaimed; rather, electric field
lines can thread the mouth of a wormhole. What looks to you like an electron is
actually a tiny wormhole mouth. If you were small enough, you could dive inside the
electron and emerge from a positron far away. In my undergraduate daydreams, I
wished this idea could be true.

But later I found out more about wormholes, and learned about topological
censorship. It turns out that if energy is nonnegative, Einsteins gravitational field
equations prevent you from traversing a wormhole the throat always pinches off
(or becomes infinitely long) before you get to the other side. It has sometimes been
suggested that quantum effects might help to hold the throat open (which sounds like
a good idea for a movie), but today well assume that wormholes are never
traversable no matter what you do.
Love in a wormhole throat: Alice and Bob are in different galaxies, but each lives near a black hole, and their
black holes are connected by a wormhole. If both jump into their black holes, they can enjoy each others
company for a while before meeting a tragic end.

Are wormholes any fun if we can never traverse them? The answer might be yes if
two black holes are connected by a wormhole. Then Alice on earth and Bob in
Andromeda can get together quickly if each jumps into a nearby black hole. For solar
mass black holes Alice and Bob will have only 10 microseconds to get acquainted
before meeting their doom at the singularity. But if the black holes are big enough,
Alice and Bob might have a fulfilling relationship before their tragic end.

This observation is exploited in a recent paper by Juan Maldacena and Lenny

Susskind (MS) in which they reconsider the AMPS puzzle (named for Almheiri,
Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully). I wrote about this puzzle before, so I wont go through
the whole story again. Heres the short version: while classical correlations can easily
be shared by many parties, quantum correlations are harder to share. If Bob is highly
entangled with Alice, that limits his ability to entangle with Carrie, and if he entangles
with Carrie instead he cant entangle with Alice. Hence we say that entanglement is
monogamous. Now, if, as most of us are inclined to believe, information is
scrambled but not destroyed by an evaporating black hole, then the radiation
emitted by an old black hole today should be highly entangled with radiation emitted
a long time ago. And if, as most of us are inclined to believe, nothing unusual
happens (at least not right away) to an observer who crosses the event horizon of a
black hole, then the radiation emitted today should be highly entangled with stuff that
is still inside the black hole. But we cant have it both ways without violating the
monogamy of entanglement!

The AMPS puzzle invites audacious reponses, and AMPS were suitably audacious.
They proposed that an old black hole has no interior a freely falling observer meets
her doom right at the horizon rather than at a singularity deep inside.

MS are also audacious, but in a different way. They helpfully summarize their key
point succinctly in a simple equation:

ER = EPR

Here, EPR means Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, whose famous paper highlighted the

weirdness of quantum correlations, while ER means Einstein-Rosen (sorry,
Podolsky), who discovered wormhole solutions to the Einstein equations. (Both
papers were published in 1935.) MS (taking Van Raamsdonk very seriously) propose
that whenever any two quantum subsystems are entangled they are connected by a
wormhole. In many cases, these wormholes are highly quantum mechanical, but in
some cases (where the quantum system under consideration has a weakly coupled
gravitational dual), the wormhole can have a smooth geometry like the one ER
described. That wormholes are not traversable is important for the consistency of ER
= EPR: just as Alice cannot use their shared entanglement to send a message to
Bob instantaneously, so she is unable to send Bob a message through their shared
wormhole.
AMPS imagined that Alice could distill qubit C from the black holes early radiation
and carry it back to the black hole, successfully verifying its entanglement with
another qubit B distilled from the recent radiation. Monogamy then ensures that qubit
B cannot be entangled with qubit A behind the horizon. Hence when Alice falls
through the horizon she will not observe the quiescent vacuum state in which A and
B are entangled; instead she encounters a high-energy particle. MS agree with this
conclusion.

AMPS go on to say that Alices actions before entering the black hole could not have
created that energetic particle; it must have been there all along, one of many such
particles constituting a seething firewall.

Here MS disagree. They argue that the excitation encountered by Alice as she
crosses the horizon was actually created by Alice herself when she interacted with
qubit C. How could Alices actions, executed far, far away from the black hole,
dramatically affect the state of the black holes interior? Because C and A are con-
nected by a wormhole!

The ER = EPR conjecture seems to allow us to view the early radiation with which
the black hole is entangled as a complementary description of the black hole interior.
Its not clear yet whether this picture works in detail, and even if it does there could
still be firewalls; maybe in some sense the early radiation is connected to the black
hole via a wormhole, yet this wormhole is wildly fluctuating rather than a smooth
geometry. Still, MS provide a promising new perspective on a deep problem.

As physicists we often rely on our sense of smell in judging scientific ideas, and
earlier proposed resolutions of the AMPS puzzle (like firewalls) did not smell right. At
first whiff, ER = EPR may smell fresh and sweet, but it will have to ripen on the shelf
for a while. If this idea is on the right track, there should be much more to say about
it. For now, wormhole lovers can relish the possibilities.

Eventually, Wheeler discarded everything is geometry in favor of an ostensibly

deeper idea: everything is information. It would be a fitting vindication of Wheelers
vision if everything in the universe, including wormholes, is made of quantum
correlations.

*Update: Commenter JM reminded me to mention Brian Swingles beautiful 2009

paper, which preceded Van Raamsdonks and proposed a far-reaching connection
between quantum entanglement and spacetime geometry.
Is Alice burning? The black hole fire-
wall controversy

Quantum correlations are monogamous. Bob can be highly entangled with Alice or with Carrie, but not both.

Back in the early 1990s, I was very interested in the quantum physics of black holes
and devoted much of my research effort to thinking about how black holes process
quantum information. That effort may have prepared me to appreciate Peter Shors
spectacular breakthrough the discovery of a quantum algorithm for factoring
intergers efficiently. I told the story here of how I secretly struggled to understand
Shors algorithm while attending a workshop on black holes in 1994.
Since the mid-1990s, quantum information has been the main focus of my research.
I hope that some of the work Ive done can help to hasten the onset of a new era in
which quantum computers are used routinely to perform super-classical tasks. But I
have always had another motivation for working on quantum information science
a conviction that insights gained by thinking about quantum computation can
illuminate deep issues in other areas of physics, especially quantum condensed
matter and quantum gravity. In recent years quantum information concepts have
begun penetrating into other fields, and I expect that trend to continue.

The study of quantum black holes has continued to be a very active and fruitful
research area in recent years. Ive not been much involved myself, though, except
for one foray (well, also this one). But my friend Lenny Susskind encouraged me to
attend a workshop on black holes at Stanford this past weekend, and Im glad I did.
It was fun, and it was gratifying to see that quantum information concepts were
prominently featured in many of the talks.
The goal of the workshop was to clarify a question raised in this paper by Almheiri,
Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully (AMPS): if a black hole is highly entangled with its
surroundings, does a freely falling observer who crosses the event horizon burn to a
crisp immediately right at the horizon. We have always believed that if Alice foolishly
enters a black hole she will be just fine for a while, but will gradually encounter
stronger and stronger gravitational forces which will eventually tear her to pieces.
AMPS argued that under the right circumstances, Alices horrible death comes much
earlier than expected, and without any warning. Joe Polchinski wrote a nice
explanation of the AMPS argument over at Cosmic Variance, but Ill give my own
version here.
To understand the AMPS puzzle, one needs to appreciate that quantum correlations
are different than classical correlations. Classical correlations can be polygamous
while quantum correlations are monogamous.
If Alice and Bob both have copies of the same newspaper, then Alice and Bob
become correlated because both can access the same information. But Carrie can
acquire a copy of that same newspaper; Bobs correlation with Alice does not prevent
him from becoming just as strongly correlated with Carrie. For that matter, anyone
else can buy a newspaper to join the party.

A quantum newspaper is different, because you can read it in two (or more)
complementary ways, and we say that two newspapers are maximally entangled
(have the strongest possible quantum correlations) if both newspapers have the
same content when both are read in the same way. In that case, if Alice reads her
paper held right-side up she finds only random gibberish, but if Bob reads his
newspaper right-side up he sees exactly the same gibberish as Alice. If on the other
hand Alice had chosen to read the paper turned sideways, she would have found
some other random gibberish, but again Bob would see the same gibberish as Alice
if he read his paper sideways, too. Because there is just one way to read a classical
newspaper, and lots of ways to read a quantum newspaper, the quantum correlations
are stronger than classical ones.

So strong, in fact, that Bobs entanglement with Alice limits his ability to entangle with
Carrie. Bobs entropy S(B), a measure of his capacity to entangle with others, is an
upper bound on the sum of Bobs entanglement E(A,B) with Alice and his
entanglement E(B,C) with Carrie. If Bob is highly entangled with Alice then he can
entangle with Carrie only by sacrificing some of his entanglement with Alice. Thats
why we say that entanglement is monogamous.
Following AMPS, imagine a black hole which is maximally entangled with another
quantum system C outside the black hole. Like any black hole, this one evaporates
by emitting Hawking radiation. Also following AMPS, assume that the evaporation is
unitary, i.e., conserves quantum information. There is strong evidence that unitarity
is an inviolable principle of physics, and we dont really know how to make sense of
quantum mechanics without it. Unitarity implies that as a system B is emitted by the
black hole in the form of Hawking radiation, this system B, like the black hole from
which it emerged, must be maximally entanged with C. And monogamy of
entanglement means that B cannot be entangled with anything else besides C.

But this spells trouble for Alice, the brave soul who dares to fall into the black hole. If
Alices passage through the event horizon were uneventful then she would fall though
space that is nearly devoid of particles. But if we cut the empty space seen by Alice
into the inside and outside of the black hole at the event horizon, then the particles
in system B seen by an observer who stays outside are paired with particles on the
inside B is entangled with a system A inside the horizon, violating the monogamy
of entanglement. Somethings wrong.

The AMPS proposal is that what Alice encounters at the horizon does not look like
empty space at all rather B and A are unentangled, which means that Alice sees
many energetic particles. Monogamy of entanglement is rescued, but not poor Alice.
She is incinerated by an intense wall of fire as she attempts to pass through the event
horizon.

If a black hole forms from a collapsing star and then radiates for a long, long, long
time until it has shed more than half its initial entropy, we expect the black hole to
become maximally entangled with the radiation already emitted, and hence (if AMPS
are right) for a firewall to appear. It is as though the singularity, which we expected
to find deep inside the black hole, has crept right up to the event horizon when the
black hole is very old.

Like many other physicists, I distrust this conclusion. The black hole could be very
large, so that as Alice approaches the horizon she experiences only very weak tidal
gravitational forces. It seems terribly unjust for Alice, unaware of the black holes age
and with no indication that anything is amiss, to suddenly fry without any warning at
all.

My first reaction to the AMPS paper was that we should think very carefully about
whether, if there are no firewalls, the putative violation of monogamy of entanglement
really has a clear operational meaning. We might be willing to tolerate polygamous
entanglement if no observer can ever detect the crime! We must ask whether it is
possible, at least in principle, for Alice to verify the entanglement between B and C,
and then test the entanglement between B and A by plunging into the black hole.
AMPS discuss this issue in their paper, but I dont consider it to be settled. One
consideration, mentioned at the workshop by both Patrick Hayden and Daniel
Harlow, is that verifying the BC entanglement requires a quantum computation that
might be infeasible as a matter of principle, at least for a large black hole.

For now, it seems appropriate to assume both information conservation and no

firewalls, seeking some way of reconciling the two. This might involve truly radical
revisions in the foundations of quantum mechanics, or bizarre nonlocal dynamics
outside the black hole. If we are forced to accept that firewalls really exist, then we
will need a deeper understanding of their dynamical origin than the indirect argument
AMPS provided.

The workshop was invigorating because nearly everyone seemed confused.

Paradoxes are always welcome in physics, as they can help to point us toward
revolutionary advances. While no consensus has yet emerged about what the AMPS
puzzle is teaching us, Im hoping that the outcome will be a big stride forward in our
understanding of quantum information in gravitational systems.