Probing the connection between entangled particles and wormholes in general relativity

Abstract: Maldacena and Susskind conjectured that two entangled particles, which can be thought of as forming an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair, are connected by a nontraversable wormhole or Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridge. They named their conjecture ER = EPR. We present a concrete quantitative model for ER = EPR, in which two spin-1/2 particles in a singlet state are connected by a nontraversable wormhole in asymptotically flat general relativity. In our model, the fermions are described by the charged Dirac equation minimally coupled to gravity. This system has static wormhole solutions. We use these solutions as initial data and numerically evolve them forward in time. Our simulations show that black holes form, which are connected by the wormhole and which render the wormhole nontraversable. We also find that the wormhole throat shrinks, which places the particles in close proximity to one another and suggests an explanation for how the wormhole facilitates the nonlocal communication required by entanglement.