BGU | The Sky is No Limit

Recent research links black holes and quantum computing: apparently the way black holes process information is similar to the way information is processed in quantum systems.

She has already proved to be a promising researcher in her field, having won research grants from the European Research Council and the Israel Science Foundation, and received a prestigious three-year Alon scholarship for outstanding young scientists from the Council for Higher Education. She has also been generously supported by the Weinstein family through the University’s presidential recruit program for promising young faculty members. Although her research focuses on theoretical physics, she too shares the scientific community’s excitement over recent groundbreaking discoveries concerning black holes, and especially the first measurements of gravitational waves in black hole collisions and the first ever images of

Some black holes are gigantic, with a mass that is hundreds of millions of times greater than the mass of our sun. These holes are insatiable, swallowing ‘unlucky’ stars that pass nearby. The geometry of space and time around them is so curved because of their mass, that an outside observer cannot see into them. In other words, their gravitational compression is so great that all matter and light are trapped within their gravitational field and cannot be observed beyond the ‘event horizon,’ the theoretical boundary surrounding a black hole, marking the point beyond which events cannot affect external observers and cannot be discerned by them. Recent research links black holes to quantum computing: apparently the way black holes process information is similar to the way information is processed in quantum systems. "I investigate these connections with an emphasis on quantum complexity, a theory within quantum information physics, which helps assess the difficulty of computational problems when implementing them on a quantum computer. The link to black holes teaches us that quantum complexity can help describe the processes that take place inside black holes, including the continuous growth in volume behind their horizons”, explains Dr. Chapman. “In other words, the unexpected connection between black holes and quantum information processing indicates that two things that at first glance seem independent, are in fact closely related. Such surprising links between unrelated fields may occur in other areas of science as well, including social sciences and humanities.

black holes, produced by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. Black holes are peculiar and massive celestial objects. Their formation is often the result of the collapse of a very massive star at the end of its life cycle. In most cases, the collapse of the star’s core results in a massive explosion and the formation of a neutron star. Scientists theorize, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, that sometimes a star’s mass is so great and its gravitational forces so powerful that the core’s collapse is insufficient to actually destroy the star, and instead of a supernova – the final explosion that occurs at the end of a star's life cycle – a black hole is formed.

View of the M87 supermassive black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. Image: European Southern Observatory

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