University of California, Berkeley | 2019 Mar 06
Physicists have used a seven-qubit quantum computer to simulate the scrambling of information inside a black hole, heralding a future in which entangled quantum bits might be used to probe the mysterious interiors of these bizarre objects.
Scrambling is what happens when matter disappears inside a black hole. The information attached to that matter — the identities of all its constituents, down to the energy and momentum of its most elementary particles — is chaotically mixed with all the other matter and information inside, seemingly making it impossible to retrieve.
This leads to a so-called “black hole information paradox,” since quantum mechanics says that information is never lost, even when that information disappears inside a black hole.
So, while some physicists claim that information falling through the event horizon of a black hole is lost forever, others argue that this information can be reconstructed, but only after waiting an inordinate amount of time — until the black hole has shrunk to nearly half its original size. ...
Verified Quantum Information Scrambling ~ Kevin A. Landsman et al
- Nature 567(7746):61 (07 Mar 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-0952-6
- arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1806.02807 > 07 Jun 2018 (v1), 18 Jun 2018 (v2)
- Physical Review X 9(1):1001 (09 Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.9.011006
- arXiv.org > quant-ph > arXiv:1803.10772 > 28 Mar 2018