Microscopic wormholes in space?

Quantum physics has a peculiar feature called entanglement (the squiggly line in the image), where two particles are said to be entangled if they have highly correlated properties despite being in disparate regions of space. Wormholes, on the other hand, are tunnel-like shortcuts in space (see the horn-like structure) that connect otherwise widely separated points. Some theorists have conjectured that these apparently unrelated physical phenomena are linked: all entangled particles are connected by microscopic wormholes. The goal of our work is to question this picture (thus the big question mark). If the conjecture is correct, it is reasonable to expect that some of the electric field (see the lines with arrows) surrounding a charged entangled particle leaks into the associated microscopic wormhole. In our work, we focus on the hydrogen atom, a naturally occurring composite of entangled charged particles––a proton and an electron––and show that precise measurements of its properties such as the net charge and spectrum of the light it emits place very strong constraints on the possibility of a wormhole’s connecting its particles. Our work thus poses a serious challenge to the validity of this conjecture.