Criticality-Assisted Transfer in Spin Chains and Wormholes

Preparing the ground state of two weakly coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models and perturbing one side, the excitation emerges on the other side, oscillating back and forth, consistent with a particle traversing an eternal wormhole. We show that critical spin chains with no simple gravitational dual have similar features. In particular, they exhibit non-thermalizing revivals with an enhancement in transmission speed, in agreement with 1+1-dimensional conformal field theory. We provide microscopic descriptions in terms of operator spreading resulting in a speed-up of information transfer, contrasting generic many-body behavior from gravitational. The limited amount of required experimental control eases study in analog quantum simulators, such as arrays of Rydberg atoms.

This project was supported in part by an appointment (E.T.K.) to the NRC Research Associateship Program at NIST, administered by the Fellowships Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.