Magnetic wormhole created for first time

Scientists in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed and created in the laboratory the first experimental wormhole that can connect two regions of space magnetically. The device could have applications in medicine, opening up ways to make MRIs more comfortable for patients.

"Wormholes" are cosmic tunnels that can connect two distant regions of the universe, and have been popularised by the dissemination of theoretical physics and by works of science fiction like Stargate, Star Trek or, more recently, Interstellar. Using present-day technology it would be impossible to create a gravitational wormhole, as the field would have to be manipulated with huge amounts of gravitational energy, which no-one yet knows how to generate. In electromagnetism, however, advances in metamaterials and invisibility have allowed researchers to put forward several designs to achieve this.

Scientists in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed and created in the laboratory the first experimental wormhole that can connect two regions of space magnetically. This consists of a tunnel that transfers the magnetic field from one point to the other while keeping it undetectable – invisible – all the way.

The researchers used metamaterials and metasurfaces to build the tunnel experimentally, so that the magnetic field from a source, such as a magnet or a an electromagnet, appears at the other end of the wormhole as an isolated magnetic monopole. This result is strange enough in itself, as magnetic monopoles – magnets with only one pole, whether north or south – do not exist in nature. The overall effect is that of a magnetic field that appears to travel from one point to another through a dimension that lies outside the conventional three dimensions.

The wormhole in this experiment is a sphere made of different layers: an external layer with a ferromagnetic surface, a second inner layer, made of superconducting material, and a ferromagnetic sheet rolled into a cylinder that crosses the sphere from one end to the other. The sphere is made in such a way as to be magnetically undetectable – invisible, in magnetic field terms – from the exterior.

The magnetic wormhole is an analogy of gravitational ones, as it "changes the topology of space, as if the inner region has been magnetically erased from space", explains Àlvar Sánchez, the lead researcher.

These same researchers had already built a magnetic fibre in 2014: a device capable of transporting the magnetic field from one end to the other. This fibre was, however, detectable magnetically. The wormhole developed now, though, is a completely three-dimensional device that is undetectable by any magnetic field.

This means a step forward towards possible applications in which magnetic fields are used: in medicine for example. This technology could, for example, increase patients' comfort by distancing them from the detectors when having MRI scans in hospital, or allow MRI images of different parts of the body to be obtained simultaneously.

Nanotechnology World Association

Quarks Linked by Wormholes?

Hypothetical shortcuts through the universe, wormholes link
separate points in space-time.

Quantum entanglement may explain gravity.

Quantum entanglement is one of the more bizarre theories to come out of the study of quantum mechanics—so strange, in fact, that Albert Einstein famously referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.”

Essentially, entanglement involves two particles, each occupying multiple states at once, for example simultaneously spinning clockwise and counterclockwise. But neither has a definite state until one is measured, causing the other particle to instantly assume a corresponding state. The resulting correlations between the particles are preserved even if they reside on opposite ends of the universe.

But what enables particles to communicate instantaneously—seemingly faster than the speed of light—over such vast distances?

Now an MIT physicist looking at entanglement through the lens of string theory has proposed an answer: 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 instead from quantum entanglement.

Julian Sonner, a senior postdoc in MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Center for Theoretical Physics, has published his results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

To see what emerges from two entangled quarks, he first created a theoretical model of quarks based on the Schwinger effect—a concept in quantum theory that makes it possible to create particles out of nothing. Once extracted from a vacuum, these particles are considered entangled.

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, where, according to Einstein’s laws, it acts to “bend” and shape space-time.

To see what geometry may emerge in the fifth dimension from entangled quarks in the fourth, Sonner employed the string theory concept of holographic duality, used to derive a more complex dimension from the next-lowest dimension.

He found that what emerged was a wormhole connecting the two entangled quarks, implying that the creation of quarks simultaneously creates a wormhole. More fundamentally, he says, gravity itself may be a result of entanglement. What’s more, the universe’s geometry as described by classical gravity may be a consequence of entanglement—pairs of particles strung together by tunneling wormholes.

“It’s the most basic representation yet that we have where entanglement gives rise to some sort of geometry,” Sonner says. “What happens if some of this entanglement is lost, and what happens to the geometry? There are many roads that can be pursued.”

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/article/524191/quarks-linked-by-wormholes/