English

Wormhole and Entanglement (Non-)Detection in the ER=EPR Correspondence

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-11-23 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Quantum Physics

Abstract

The recently proposed ER=EPR correspondence postulates the existence of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) between entangled states (such as EPR pairs). Entanglement is famously known to be unobservable in quantum mechanics, in that there exists no observable (or, equivalently, projector) that can accurately pick out whether a generic state is entangled. Many features of the geometry of spacetime, however, are observables, so one might worry that the presence or absence of a wormhole could identify an entangled state in ER=EPR, violating quantum mechanics, specifically, the property of state-independence of observables. In this note, we establish that this cannot occur: there is no measurement in general relativity that unambiguously detects the presence of a generic wormhole geometry. This statement is the ER=EPR dual of the undetectability of entanglement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1509.05426,
  title  = {Wormhole and Entanglement (Non-)Detection in the ER=EPR Correspondence},
  author = {Ning Bao and Jason Pollack and Grant N. Remmen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.05426},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

14 pages, 4 figures