2022 physics breakthrough Quantum computers simulate holographic wormholes

In early 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is unfurling its sun visor: a giant, fingernail-thin, delicate blanket that, once opened, will plunge the observatory into a cold shadow and open its view of the infrared universe. Within hours of the ball dropping in New York City, the visor could have jammed, ruining the new telescope and throwing billions of dollars and decades of work into the void. But the visor opened perfectly, kicking off a new year of physics.

JWST soon began to glimpse the gorgeous new face of the universe. on July 11, the United States released the telescope's first public image: a panoramic view of thousands of galaxies at various distances in space and time. Four more instantly iconic images were released the next day. Since then, the telescope's data has spread among hundreds of astronomers and cosmologists, and discoveries and papers on the universe continue to emerge.

Astronomy is swimming in all kinds of fresh data. In May, for example, the Event Horizon telescope released the first-ever picture of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy: one of several recent observations that have helped astrophysicists figure out how galaxies work. Other telescopes are mapping the positions of millions of galaxies, a work that has recently produced surprising evidence of an asymmetric distribution of galaxies.

Breakthroughs in condensed matter physics are also coming fast. an experiment published in September nearly proved the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, which may help the field in its perennial quest for a material that can work at room temperature, a goal of two-dimensional materials research. This year, a flat crystal that once helped lubricate skis has emerged as a powerful platform for exotic and potentially useful quantum phenomena.

Particle physicists seeking new fundamental components of the universe are not so lucky. They continue to unravel what we already know about particle characteristics, but theorists have few concrete clues about how to move beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, the breathtakingly comprehensive set of equations about the quantum world that has been the most popular theory for half a century.

Here are Quantamagazine's top five breakthroughs in physics for 2022.

01The tantalizing heavy boson

The Tevatron collider in Illinois smashed its last proton a decade ago, but the staff has been analyzing its detection of the W boson, a particle in between the weak forces. They announced in April that by painstakingly tracking down and eliminating sources of error in the data, they have measured the mass of the W boson more accurately than ever before and found that the particle is much heavier than predicted by the standard model of particle physics.

The real difference from the standard model would be a monumental discovery that points to new particles or effects beyond the scope of the theory. However, other experiments measuring the W boson have measured masses closer to the predictions of the Standard Model: most notably the ATLAS experiment at the European Large Hadron Collider. The new Tevatron measurements are supposedly more accurate, but one or both groups may have missed some subtle sources of error.

The ATLAS experiment aims to address this issue. As ATLAS member Guillaume Unal says, "The W boson has to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic."

02Rethinking naturalness

All this buzz about faint hints of problems with the Standard Model reflects the troubled situation in which particle physicists find themselves. The 17 elementary particles known to exist and described by the Standard Model do not solve all the mysteries of the universe; however, the Large Hadron Collider has yet to discover an 18th.

For years, theorists have struggled with how to continue their research; but recently, a new direction has opened up. Theorists are rethinking a long-held assumption known as naturalness: a way of reasoning about what is natural or expected in the laws of nature. This idea is closely related to the reductionist, nested structure of nature, in which something large is explained by something small. Now, theorists wonder if profound questions of naturalness like the lack of new particles at the Large Hadron Collider might imply that the laws of nature are not structured in this simple bottom-up way. In a flurry of new papers, they are exploring how gravity might dramatically alter this situation.

Commenting on the current state of the field, theoretical particle physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia says, "Some people call it a crisis. But in my opinion, it's a moment where I think we are moving toward studying complexity."

03Unlocking two-dimensional physics

Thousands of condensed matter physicists have studied graphene, a sheet of crystals made of carbon atoms with special properties. But recently, a new family of planar crystals has emerged on the scene: transition metal dichloride, or TMDs. stacking different TMDs produces tailored materials with different quantum properties and behavior.

The near-miraculous properties of these materials are known largely thanks to Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak, a married couple who run a lab together at Cornell University. They have developed many two-dimensional materials with a background in condensed matter physics, while also unraveling a number of exciting new breakthroughs emerging from their lab, from artificial atoms to long-lived excitons.

04Holographic Wormholes in Quantum Computers

In November, physicists announced a first-of-its-kind "quantum gravity on a chip experiment," in the words of Caltech team leader Maria Spiropulu, in which they ran a "wormhole invisible transfer protocol" on Google's Sycamore quantum computer to manipulate the flow of quantum information in the computer in such a way that it is mathematically equivalent or dual to the flow of information through a wormhole between two points in space-time. protocol" on Google's Sycamore quantum computer, manipulating the flow of quantum information in the computer in such a way that it is mathematically equivalent or dual to information passing through a wormhole between two points in space-time.

To be clear, a wormhole is not part of the space-time we inhabit. It is a simulation or a hologram. Moreover, it has a different spacetime geometry than the real, positively curved 4D spacetime in which we live. The focus of the experiment is to demonstrate holographic duality, an important theoretical discovery of the last 25 years, which states that quantum systems of certain particles can be interpreted as a curved, gravitational space-time continuum. (Spacetime can be thought of loosely as a hologram arising from a low-dimensional quantum system.) In more advanced quantum computer experiments in the coming years, researchers hope to explore the mechanics of holographic duality, with the ultimate goal of unraveling "whether gravity in our universe is generated by some quantum [bits], just as this little baby's one-dimensional wormhole is generated by a Sycamore chip," said Daniel Jaeger of Harvard University, who developed the Wormhole Invisibility Transfer Protocol. protocol, said Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University.

Holographic wormholes have generated divergent opinions among physicists and general readers. Some physicists argue that the quantum simulation is too lean compared to the theoretical model on which it is based to have a holographic double description like a wormhole. Many believe that the physicists behind the work, and the journalists covering it, should have done a better job of emphasizing that this is not a real wormhole; in fact, to open a wormhole in real space-time would require negative energy material - which does not seem to exist.

05JWST is revolutionizing astronomy

The biggest thing in physics this year is floating a million miles away, at a point in space known as Lagrange Point 2, with a sunshade that blocks the Earth, Moon and Sun at the same time. images of JWST have brought hearts to a standstill: its data are already reshaping our understanding of the universe.

When the U.S. released the first images from JWST, researchers immediately began to discover more interesting galaxies. Two weeks later, JWST data has already yielded new discoveries about galaxies, stars, exoplanets, and even Jupiter. One of the most exciting early discoveries is that galaxies appear to have clustered very early in the history of the universe, perhaps even earlier than can be easily explained by cosmological models.

Also, 2023 looks forward to JWST's study of a rocky planet in a nearby star system called TRAPPIST-1. A key specialty of JWST is dissecting the starlight that pierces the atmosphere of a distant planet as it moves across its star's surface. The JWST telescope has produced excellent exoplanet spectra; but potentially habitable worlds, such as planet TRAPPIST-1, are so tiny that they will need to be measured continuously over the next few years. in another sustained measurement of their atmospheric features.

Let's look forward to more on this in the coming years.

Reference links:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-biggest-discoveries-in-physics-in-2022-20221222/