Wormhole Teleportation Protocol (WITP)

• WITP is a family of protocols that uses controlled scrambling and entangled thermofield double states to mimic traversable wormhole dynamics for state transfer.
• It differs from standard quantum teleportation by employing inter-side couplings and operator-size effects to govern fidelity and mutual information.
• Experimental and theoretical implementations in SYK models and superconducting systems highlight its role in probing the links between entanglement, chaos, and emergent geometry.

Wormhole-inspired teleportation protocol (WITP) denotes a family of quantum-information protocols in which a message is inserted into one side of an entangled bipartite many-body system, scrambled, subjected to a brief left-right deformation, and later recovered on the opposite side. In the holographic interpretation, the shared resource is typically a thermofield double (TFD) state dual to a two-sided geometry, while the inter-side coupling plays the role of the deformation that renders the wormhole traversable. Operationally, WITP is therefore distinct from textbook Bennett teleportation with a Bell-basis measurement and Pauli corrections, even though measurement-and-feedforward realizations exist and, in some formulations, are exactly equivalent to a unitary two-sided coupling (Susskind et al., 2017, Gao et al., 2019).

1. Conceptual and holographic foundations

The modern formulation of WITP grew out of the ER=EPR interpretation of entanglement. In that picture, quantum teleportation can be viewed geometrically as a quantum system traversing an Einstein-Rosen bridge between entangled subsystems, while the classical bit string transmitted outside the horizon carries no information about the teleported state itself. The same framework also emphasizes that the teleported system can retain a memory of what it encountered in the wormhole interior, so the protocol is not merely a re-labeling of ordinary state transfer but an operational probe of an interior channel (Susskind et al., 2017).

A bulk realization was given in two-sided AdS$_2$ gravity by turning on a double-trace interaction

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$

This deformation induces a negative averaged null energy contribution along the horizon, shifts the singularity upward in the Penrose diagram, and opens a gap through which a signal can pass. In the near-boundary description, the corrected dilaton contains the term that produces the right-side shift

$$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$

so for $h>0$ the wormhole becomes traversable. The same construction was shown to be thermodynamically consistent, with the energy change satisfying $\delta E = T\,\delta S$, and to remain traversable at leading order even when Janus deformations are added to represent the teleportee state (Bak et al., 2018).

The same mechanism extends beyond the unshifted TFD. For time-shifted thermofield states,

$$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$

the right-side operator in the coupling must be replaced by the precursor

$X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$

With that modification, the outgoing quantum state on the right at lab time $t=T+t_{\rm out}$ is exactly the same as in the ordinary TFD experiment, just time-shifted. This places WITP within a larger class of entangled states related by large right-side time translations rather than restricting it to a single background state (Breukelen et al., 2017).

2. Canonical protocol architecture

In its standard many-body form, WITP starts from a Bell pair between a reference qubit and a message qubit together with a TFD state of two chaotic systems. A representative initialization is

$$|\psi_0\rangle = |\mathrm{EPR}\rangle_{PQ}\otimes |\mathrm{TFD}\rangle_{LR}, \qquad |\mathrm{TFD}\rangle_{LR}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{Z}}\sum_n e^{-\beta E_n/2}|E_n\rangle_L\otimes \overline{|E_n\rangle}_R.$$

The message qubit is inserted into the left system by a SWAP-like operation at an early time, the left and right subsystems evolve under their respective Hamiltonians, a brief left-right coupling is applied at the midpoint, and the output is later extracted from the right subsystem into a target qubit. In the concrete SYK formulation, the protocol uses five systems $R,Q,T,l,r$, with insertion and extraction implemented by fermionic SWAP operators $$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$0 and $$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$1 (Gao et al., 2019).

Several inter-side couplings occur in the literature. A canonical SYK choice is

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$2

while the hardware-oriented sparse-SYK implementation uses

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$3

A related family, used in recent minimal-SYK studies, writes the coupling in number-operator form,

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$4

inserted between left and right evolutions as the familiar $$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$5 wormhole step (Byun et al., 11 Apr 2026, Joshi et al., 25 Jan 2026).

One recurrent point is that the protocol need not be implemented as a genuinely quantum two-sided gate. In the original SYK proposal, the elementary Majorana coupling can be decomposed into simple single-qubit measurements and conditional rotations, so the transmission admits a classical-channel interpretation. A more explicit long-range construction replaces the original $$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$6 by

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$7

after which Alice measures the left qubits, sends the outcomes $$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$8 to Bob, and Bob applies

$$\delta H(t) = -h(t)\,{\cal O}_{R}(t)\,{\cal O}_{L}(-t).$$9

This modified coupling removes the unwanted direct-transfer channel that exists in the warm-up limit of the original $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$0 and isolates the genuine wormhole-like contribution (Lykken et al., 2024).

3. Scrambling, operator size, and the microscopic transmission mechanism

A defining feature of WITP is that successful transmission is tied to scrambling rather than to a fixed low-dimensional entangled pair. The key organizing concept is operator size. Under chaotic evolution, a local operator spreads into a superposition of many-body Pauli strings, and the weak coupling acts as a size-dependent phase rotation. In the simplest state-transfer model, the relevant unitary assigns a phase $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$1 to each Pauli string $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$2, and the resulting channel is controlled by the size dependence of that phase. This is the origin of “teleportation by size,” where information transmission is governed by the growth of operator size under chaotic dynamics (Brown et al., 2019).

The same circuit, however, need not owe its success to a semiclassical wormhole. “Peaked-size teleportation” identifies a non-gravitational mechanism in which the size distribution of the evolved operator is sufficiently narrow that the coupling effectively adds a common phase across the dominant operator sector. In that regime,

$$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$3

and teleportation fidelity is controlled by the average operator size and its width. This mechanism was shown analytically and numerically in random unitary circuits, high-temperature SYK, one-dimensional spin chains, and gravity with strong stringy corrections. The low-temperature holographic regime differs sharply: there the relevant structure is not merely a narrow size distribution but a nontrivial phase-winding structure of operator coefficients, often called size winding, and that regime can achieve order-one fidelity even when the peaked-size estimate would be thermally suppressed (Schuster et al., 2021).

In the SYK realization of traversable-wormhole teleportation, this microscopic distinction is encoded in the left-right correlator

$$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$4

which directly determines the reduced $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$5 density matrix and hence the mutual information. The basic single-fermion encoding already reproduces the semiclassical traversable-wormhole structure, while a composite $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$6-fermion encoding drives the maximal correlator toward unity. For $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$7 with $$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$8, the protocol yields

$$\Delta \tau^R_+ \sim \frac{8\pi G}{\bar\phi L}\, h \alpha_s + O(G^2 h^2),$$9

so the corresponding mutual information approaches the perfect-teleportation value $h>0$0 (Gao et al., 2019).

A common misconception is therefore corrected by the later literature: observation of a teleportation signal in the WITP circuit does not by itself establish a smooth semiclassical wormhole. The same circuit can transmit information through generic chaotic dynamics, late-time interference between macroscopically different emergent geometries, or strong-stringy scattering. A plausible implication is that WITP is better understood as a protocol family whose geometric interpretation depends on the scrambling regime rather than as a single uniquely gravitational effect (Brown et al., 2019, Schuster et al., 2021).

4. Regimes, diagnostics, and resource constraints

The main diagnostics of WITP are left-right correlators, mutual information, and entanglement-sensitive measures. In the SYK teleportation literature, the anti-commutator

$h>0$1

is used as a direct signal of teleportation, while finite-qubit analyses quantify the output with mutual information

$h>0$2

and entanglement negativity

$h>0$3

In the large-$h>0$4 probe limit, strong sign asymmetry under $h>0$5 and causal time ordering are the hallmark signatures of the traversable regime; at finite $h>0$6, both become progressively blurred by interference and geometric broadening (Milekhin et al., 2022, Liu et al., 2024).

The literature consistently separates a low-temperature “gravitational regime” from a high-temperature “peaked-size regime.” A recent formulation tracks this distinction using the second stabilizer Rényi entropy

$h>0$7

In the gravitational regime, fidelity rises concurrently with magic from early times; in the peaked-size regime, magic saturates near the Haar-typical value before teleportation onset. The same work shows that a chaotic random two-local model can generate near-maximal magic yet fail to teleport, so non-stabilizerness is necessary but not sufficient. What matters is structured redistribution of magic into the operator sectors compatible with extraction, not raw magic alone (Joshi et al., 17 Jun 2026).

At the dynamical level, both the Gao-Jafferis-Wall and Kitaev-Yoshida protocols exhibit a measurement-induced phase transition when applied continuously at sufficiently large coupling or projection rate. At small rate, teleportation is confined to a short time window; at large rate, the system enters a steady state in which teleportation is possible at any later time. In the dual Jackiw-Teitelboim description, that steady state is interpreted as an eternal traversable wormhole. For the symmetric low-energy GJW solution, the phase structure is controlled by

$h>0$8

with $h>0$9 corresponding to the eternal traversable phase (Milekhin et al., 2022).

Resource accounting places additional constraints on WITP. Quantum information teleportation and quantum energy teleportation can be realized by the same traversable-wormhole protocol, but they compete for the same entanglement resource. In the perturbative wormhole regime,

$\delta E = T\,\delta S$0

and in the finite-dimensional thermal setting the combined performance obeys

$\delta E = T\,\delta S$1

This establishes that WITP-like channels are entanglement-limited and thermodynamically constrained: improving information transfer reduces the extractable work available on the receiving side (Wang et al., 2024).

Finite-size studies sharpen the same point from another direction. In strongly interacting, near-maximally chaotic systems, a sharp semiclassical wormhole signature requires a surprisingly large system size, around $\delta E = T\,\delta S$2, whereas weakly interacting systems show the opposite trend and can exhibit enhanced apparent teleportation as $\delta E = T\,\delta S$3 decreases. This suggests that small-$\delta E = T\,\delta S$4 demonstrations and large-$\delta E = T\,\delta S$5 semiclassical interpretations are not interchangeable (Liu et al., 2024).

5. Extensions, deformations, and generalized settings

A major line of recent work studies deformations of the canonical SYK channel rather than the undeformed protocol itself. One such deformation introduces balanced gain and loss at the boundaries through a $\delta E = T\,\delta S$6-symmetric non-Hermitian term

$\delta E = T\,\delta S$7

so that

$\delta E = T\,\delta S$8

The resulting spectrum remains real until the exceptional-point threshold

$\delta E = T\,\delta S$9

after which the $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$0-broken phase acts as a causal amplifier. In that phase the teleported signal norm grows exponentially, the traversal time window remains fixed, the critical threshold $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$1 is distributed log-normally over 100 disorder realizations, and deep in the broken phase the channel produces a purification effect with near-perfect teleportation fidelity for post-selected states (Joshi et al., 25 Jan 2026).

Another deformation models a gravitational-wave-inspired boundary strain by a periodic Floquet perturbation,

$$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$2

At $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$3, exact numerics with disorder averaging show two amplitude regimes separated near $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$4, a low-pass frequency response with strongest suppression at $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$5, and a genuine scrambling delay. For an inspiral chirp, the fidelity peak is shifted by

$$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$6

while an OTOC diagnostic yields

$$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$7

The effect persists across $$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$8 Majorana modes, indicating no systematic finite-size suppression in that range (Joshi et al., 19 Mar 2026).

Circuit-level generalizations also modify the message sector. A two-qubit Bell-state variant of SYK-based WITP uses successive SWAPs to inject

$$|\Psi_T\rangle = e^{i H_R T}\,|\mathrm{TFD}\rangle,$$9

and diagnoses performance with the Pauli-stabilizer fidelity

$X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$0

where $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$1, $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$2, and $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$3. In that study, the Bell-state protocol yields a considerable enhancement in fidelity relative to the single-qubit version, with best Bell fidelity $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$4 at $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$5. The same work reports that the SYK-based protocol achieves higher teleportation fidelity than a transverse-field Ising-model counterpart (Joshi et al., 18 Jun 2025).

WITP has also been transplanted beyond AdS/SYK. In Schwarzschild-de Sitter space, antipodal observers in the Bunch-Davies state can store Hawking modes from the cosmological horizon, use a near-Nariai black hole as an energy reservoir, and release synchronized energy pulses that open a traversable channel. In that setting the transfer capacity is bounded roughly by the black-hole entropy,

$X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$6

and in a $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$7-dimensional de Sitter JT reduction the protocol acquires an explicit island interpretation through the generalized entropy formula

$X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$8

This suggests that wormhole-inspired teleportation is not confined to a single holographic duality framework (Aguilar-Gutierrez et al., 2023).

6. Experimental realizations, adjacent proposals, and interpretive boundaries

WITP has moved from purely theoretical construction to hardware implementation. A recent superconducting-processor realization implemented traversable-wormhole-inspired teleportation in a chaotic binary sparse $X_R(0) = e^{i H_R T}\,\mathcal{O}_R\,e^{-i H_R T}.$9 SYK model with $t=T+t_{\rm out}$0, $t=T+t_{\rm out}$1, and $t=T+t_{\rm out}$2. The protocol used a variationally prepared approximate TFD state, a single-step first-order Lie-Trotter decomposition, and tomographic reconstruction of the output. The TFD preparation reached about $t=T+t_{\rm out}$3 fidelity and used 35 echoed cross-resonance gates; the full teleportation circuit at the chosen operating point used 377 two-qubit gates with overall depth about 1000. The principal observable was the mutual information

$t=T+t_{\rm out}$4

and the main experimental signature was the sign-dependent asymmetry

$t=T+t_{\rm out}$5

which remained visible in raw hardware data despite strong NISQ noise (Byun et al., 11 Apr 2026).

A distinct operational strand replaces the scrambling-based SYK dynamics by a fully unitary entanglement-recycling teleportation protocol motivated by ER=EPR. In that scheme, Alice and Bob share two EPR pairs, Alice applies a three-qubit unitary

$t=T+t_{\rm out}$6

sends one qubit to Bob, and Bob applies the same $t=T+t_{\rm out}$7. The net effect is

$t=T+t_{\rm out}$8

so the entanglement resource is restored rather than consumed. The intermediate transmitted qubit is maximally mixed,

$t=T+t_{\rm out}$9

which underlies the claim of unconditional security. An IBM 5-qubit Santiago implementation reported fidelities above the $$|\psi_0\rangle = |\mathrm{EPR}\rangle_{PQ}\otimes |\mathrm{TFD}\rangle_{LR}, \qquad |\mathrm{TFD}\rangle_{LR}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{Z}}\sum_n e^{-\beta E_n/2}|E_n\rangle_L\otimes \overline{|E_n\rangle}_R.$$0 classical limit for a representative set of input states (Czelusta et al., 2021).

The broader literature also contains operationally related but conceptually distinct proposals. “Counterportation” uses two exchange-free CNOTs, local Hadamards, and cavity QED to transfer an unknown qubit without particle exchange and without preshared entanglement or classical communication. That framework interprets the mediator as a “local wormhole” in a constructor-theoretic sense rather than as a traversable wormhole generated by double-trace dynamics. It is therefore adjacent to WITP rather than identical to the canonical TFD-plus-coupling protocol (Salih, 2018).

Across these implementations and variants, the principal interpretive boundary remains stable. WITP does not describe literal spacetime travel in the laboratory. It describes a quantum-information channel whose dynamics mirror traversable-wormhole constructions and whose observables—mutual information, anti-commutators, negativity, fidelity, and related scrambling diagnostics—can, in favorable regimes, emulate features of bulk causality. The literature repeatedly emphasizes that one must distinguish successful information transfer, peaked-size transport, interference signaling, and genuinely semiclassical traversability. This suggests that WITP is best regarded as a controlled experimental and theoretical framework for probing the relation between entanglement, scrambling, and emergent geometric transmission, rather than as a single phenomenon with a unique microscopic interpretation (Brown et al., 2019, Liu et al., 2024).