They Put a “Wormhole” on a Quantum Chip. What Really Happened?
A 2026 experiment revisits a gravity-inspired model of information transfer. The surprise is real; a tunnel through space is not.
A simulated storm does not make you wet. A quantum experiment inspired by a wormhole does not punch a tunnel through the laboratory, either. What it can do is let physicists test how information behaves in a carefully chosen model connected to ideas from gravity.[1]
A 2026 preprint by Moongul Byun, Keun-Young Kim and Hyeonsoo Lee reports an experiment using a small chaotic quantum model on a processor. The researchers investigated a protocol inspired by a traversable wormhole, with information transferred between parts of the model. The manuscript was revised in May.[1]
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Their reported signal changed differently depending on the sign of an interaction in the protocol. That qualitative pattern was the point of the test. Noise prevented perfect numerical agreement between the hardware results and exact simulations, an important limitation that should travel with the headline.[1]
The language has a complicated history. An earlier 2022 wormhole experiment prompted technical objections about how closely its small model reproduced the desired physics, followed by a response from the original team. Those exchanges concern the interpretation of particular models, not whether someone secretly built a doorway across space.[2][3]
The newer work should also be read as a preprint, not a settled experimental discovery of a real wormhole. Its appeal is more specific: quantum processors may become useful laboratories for testing difficult ideas about information and gravity. The quotation marks around “wormhole” are not there to spoil the story. They help tell the right one.[1]