Ricci-Flat and Charged Wormholes in Five Dimensions

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes five-dimensional Ricci-flat and charged wormhole solutions connecting different spacetimes, revealing their traversability properties, quantum tunneling phenomena, and duality interpretations in string theory.

Contribution

It introduces new five-dimensional Ricci-flat and charged wormhole solutions, exploring their traversability, quantum tunneling, and dual string tachyon interpretations.

Findings

Non-traversable for timelike and null geodesics

Existence of accelerated trajectories traversing the wormholes

Quantum tunneling between asymptotic regions occurs

Abstract

We construct stationary Ricci-flat inter-universe Lorentzian wormhole solutions in all D\ge 5 dimensions that connect two flat asymptotic spacetimes. Such a solution can be viewed as the gravity dual of a string tachyon state whose linear momentum is larger than its tension. We focus our analysis on the D=5 wormholes which are not traversable for the timelike and null geodesics; however, we demonstrate that there exist accelerated timelike trajectories that traverse from one asymptotic region to the other. We further study the minimally-coupled scalar wave equation and demonstrate that the quantum tunnelling between two worlds must occur. We also obtain charged wormholes in five-dimensional supergravities. With appropriate choice of parameters, these wormholes connect AdS$_3\times S^2$ in one asymptotic region to flat Minkowskian spacetime in the other.