Monika Schleier-Smith is hoping to create space-time from scratch in her lab
Harrison Truong/Stanford University
SPACE-TIME will not be elementary. Instead, in accordance to the holographic precept, it emerges from one thing deeper, like a 3D hologram emerges from a flat floor. The precept says that space-time, and by extension gravity, arises from quantum entanglement.
With that in thoughts, Monika Schleier-Smith (pictured above), a physicist at Stanford University in California, is trying to create space-time from scratch. Her method simulates a 2D holographic boundary round a universe, which, in accordance to the holographic precept, is sufficient to encode all the data that describes the universe inside. This “holographic duality” says that space-time and the lower-dimensional boundary that it emerges from are equal.
In essence, Schleier-Smith’s methodology entails tabletop experiments which have the potential to reveal how the holographic precept contributes to phenomena all the best way down to these on the smallest scales, the place space-time would emerge.
Lyndie Chiou: What is your experimental set-up?
Monika Schleier-Smith: The instruments I work with are laser-cooled atoms. We have remoted atoms in a vacuum chamber and we use lasers to deliver them to very low temperatures – millionths of a level above absolute zero. We pin them the place we would like them and it’s primarily a place to begin for having a really well-controlled mannequin of a quantum system.
How are you able to inform the particles are entangled?
We’ve been finding out this concept of holographic duality [by trapping] atoms between two mirrors that kind an optical resonator. The cool factor about this optical resonator is it lets any atom speak to every other atom. Photons can journey between these atoms and …