Wormhole-Inspired Teleportation Protocol

Updated 1 February 2026

Wormhole-inspired teleportation protocols are quantum processes that map state transfer to traversable wormholes via AdS/CFT duality and engineered boundary couplings.
They leverage scrambling dynamics and operator size winding to optimize teleportation fidelity through precise double-trace interactions.
Experimental implementations in trapped ions, superconducting qubits, and SYK simulators validate the approach, offering insights into quantum chaos and emergent spacetime phenomena.

A wormhole-inspired teleportation protocol is a quantum information protocol developed in the context of AdS/CFT holography, where the transmission of quantum states between two entangled systems is mapped onto the traversal of a wormhole between dual spacetime regions. This paradigm realizes teleportation as a physical process associated with traversable Einstein–Rosen bridges, engineered by precise boundary couplings that violate the averaged null energy condition. The protocol provides a framework for probing chaotic quantum dynamics, scrambling, and entanglement transfer, and has been instantiated in a variety of quantum simulator architectures.

1. Foundations: AdS/CFT Duality and Traversable Wormholes

The AdS/CFT correspondence asserts an equivalence between a $d$ -dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) and a $(d+1)$ -dimensional gravity theory on Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. The thermofield double (TFD) state in two non-interacting CFT copies,

$|{\rm TFD}\rangle = \frac{1}{\sqrt{Z}}\sum_n e^{-\beta E_n/2}|E_n\rangle_L \otimes |E_n^*\rangle_R,$

is dual to an eternal AdS black hole, with its two exteriors joined by a non-traversable wormhole. The causal structure ensures that, absent additional couplings, local operations on one boundary cannot signal to the other (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021).

Gao–Jafferis–Wall (GJW) showed that adding a transient double-trace boundary coupling,

$\delta S = g\int dt\,\sum_x O_L(t,x) O_R(-t,x),$

where $O_L$ , $O_R$ are single-trace operators of scaling dimension $\Delta < d/2$ , renders the wormhole traversable. In the bulk, this induces a negative-energy shockwave, violating the averaged null-energy condition (ANEC) and producing the requisite Shapiro time advance for left-to-right signal transmission (Susskind et al., 2017, Bhattacharyya et al., 2021).

2. Protocol Structure and Mechanism

The canonical wormhole-inspired teleportation protocol operates as follows (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021):

State Preparation: Initiate a $|{\rm TFD}\rangle$ on $H_L \otimes H_R$ at $t=0$ .
Backward Evolution: Evolve the left system backwards by $U_L^\dagger(t)$ .
Message Insertion: Swap in the unknown "message" state $|\psi\rangle$ in a small left subsystem.
Scrambling: Forward evolve left side by $U_L(t)$ , causing information scrambling.
Coupling/Interaction: Apply the instantaneous double-trace coupling at $t=0$ , $G = \exp(i g V)$ , typically with $V = (1/K)\sum_{j \in {\rm carrier}} O_{j,L}(0) O_{j,R}(0)$ .
Right Evolution: Forward evolve right system by $U_R(t)$ .
Decoding: Apply a decoding unitary on the right to recover $|\psi\rangle$ .

The teleportation channel fidelity is linked to the two-point correlator $G_\beta$ :

$F \approx |G_\beta|^2, \qquad G_\beta = {\rm Tr}[\rho^{1/2} Q^\dagger(-t) Q(-t) \rho^{1/2}],$

with optimal fidelity at $g \sim \pi/K$ and scrambling time $t_* \sim (\beta / 2\pi) \ln N^2$ (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, Brown et al., 2019).

3. Scrambling, Size Winding, and Teleportation Fidelity

Quantum information initially localized on a few degrees of freedom undergoes scrambling, proliferating into non-local operator strings. Operator size diagnostics,

$P(l; O, t) = \sum_{|P| = l} |c_P(t)|^2,$

track the spread and the "winding" of operators.

In traversable wormhole teleportation, fidelity peaks when a sharply peaked operator-size distribution arises: the coupling unwinds the size-winding phase in one boundary and re-winds it in the other. In SYK model realizations, teleportation fidelity is enhanced by random matrix universality and maximally chaotic operator growth (Joshi et al., 18 Jun 2025, Brown et al., 2019, Schuster et al., 2021). At finite temperature, fidelity is suppressed by Boltzmann weighting of high-energy states.

For multi-qubit teleportation, the protocol generalizes using higher-dimensional stabilizer fidelities, e.g., for two-qubit Bell states via

$F_{\Phi^+}(\beta) = \frac{1}{2}\left[1 + \langle X \otimes X \rangle + \langle Y \otimes Y \rangle + \langle Z \otimes Z \rangle\right]$

(Joshi et al., 18 Jun 2025).

4. Variations: Measurement-Induced and Bidirectional Protocols

Measurement-induced protocols exploit projective measurement and postselection to teleport bulk information. Measuring a subset of boundary degrees in a TFD state induces an entanglement wedge phase transition, with mutual information quantifying the wedge transfer and a decoding unitary reconstructing the teleported state on the unmeasured boundary (Antonini et al., 2022, Antonini et al., 2022).

Bidirectional teleportation extends the protocol: Hayden–Preskill recovery and parallel scrambling–unscrambling channels, supplemented by mediator measurement, realize SWAP gates between collective degrees of freedom. The duality to traversable wormholes holds in quantum simulators with scrambling dynamics (Dicke model, cavity QED, trapped ions), and fidelity saturates for mediator dimension $D \gg d^2$ , with

$\overline{\mathcal F} \approx \frac{1}{1 + d^2/D}$

(Vikram et al., 21 Jan 2026).

5. Experimental Realizations and Quantum Simulator Architectures

Laboratory implementations have occurred in several platforms:

Trapped Ions (N=7): Protocol employed Mølmer–Sørensen entangling gates among carrier ions; teleportation fidelity $\sim 0.78$ for single-qubit states, with measured OTOCs and size-winding (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, Brown et al., 2019).
Superconducting Qubits/Rydberg Atom Arrays: Cross-coupling of chains by ZZ or long-range dressing realizes $V$ ; system sizes $K$ up to $\sim10$ , limited by coherence times of $20$– $50\,\mu s$ (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, Brown et al., 2019).
SYK Model Simulators: Digital circuits using Jordan–Wigner mapping to qubits, four-body interactions, and measurement-feedforward coupling; sizes $N \sim 8$ –$12$, gate depths $\sim 100$ , error rates $<10^{-2}$ (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, Joshi et al., 18 Jun 2025, Joshi et al., 25 Jan 2026).

Long-range or classical-channel variants replace short-range quadratic couplings with size-sensitive multi-qubit operators, enabling robust teleportation over classical communication links and suppressing spurious swap channels (Lykken et al., 2024).

6. Advanced Mechanisms: Non-Hermitian Deformations and Higher Dimensions

Parity–time ( $\mathcal{PT}$ )-symmetric non-Hermitian deformations in the boundary Hamiltonians drive spectral exceptional points, altering wormhole traversability. In the $\mathcal{PT}$ -broken regime, exponential amplification of the teleported signal norm is achieved, and entanglement purification acts as a distiller for near-unit fidelity in post-selected states. The critical non-Hermiticity threshold $\gamma_c$ follows a log-normal distribution, revealing strong disorder dependence (Joshi et al., 25 Jan 2026).

In higher-dimensional AdS, traversable wormhole protocols survive with generalization of the ANEC violation and traversability diagnostics. The butterfly velocity governing signal propagation scales as $v_B = 1/(d-1)$ , yielding subluminal bounds in $d>2$ . The capacity for information transfer decays with increasing dimension (Ahn et al., 2020).

7. Open Challenges and Future Directions

Current regimes are hindered by system size ( $N\ll \infty$ ), decoherence, and gate errors (1–2%) that limit multi-qubit teleportation and fidelity. Finite-temperature TFD state preparation remains costly, with scaling bottlenecked by hybrid variational or parent-Hamiltonian approaches. Diagnostics for bulk stringy corrections and operator complexity are not experimentally accessible (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021).

Scaling prospects include error-mitigation and error-corrected NISQ devices, larger-K analog simulators, and new observables: reflected entropy, entanglement wedge reconstruction, and bulk complexity growth. The transition to multi-qubit and finite-temperature teleportation protocols is underway, with anticipated advances in experimental bulk reconstruction beyond semiclassical gravity (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021).

In summary, wormhole-inspired teleportation protocols effect the transfer of quantum states via engineered boundary couplings that realize traversable wormholes in the dual bulk. Theoretical and experimental work has elucidated the quantum circuit structure, scrambling dynamics, fidelity diagnostics, and laboratory feasibility. These protocols offer a route to probing emergent spacetime phenomena, quantum chaos, and entanglement transfer, with a clear path to scaling and new quantum communication applications (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021, Susskind et al., 2017, Joshi et al., 18 Jun 2025, Joshi et al., 25 Jan 2026, Antonini et al., 2022, Ahn et al., 2020, Brown et al., 2019, Schuster et al., 2021, Vikram et al., 21 Jan 2026).