Electric fields and quantum wormholes

TL;DR

This paper explores how electric fields can thread quantum wormholes, introducing a measure called wormhole susceptibility, and shows it can be comparable to classical wormholes with enough entangled matter.

Contribution

It defines a non-perturbative measure for electric field passage through quantum wormholes and compares its magnitude to classical wormholes within effective field theory.

Findings

Electric fields can thread quantum wormholes.

Wormhole susceptibility is suppressed by gauge coupling but can be enhanced.

Sufficient entanglement can make quantum wormholes as traversable as classical ones.

Abstract

Electric fields can thread a classical Einstein-Rosen bridge. Maldacena and Susskind have recently suggested that in a theory of dynamical gravity the entanglement of ordinary perturbative quanta should be viewed as creating a quantum version of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between the particles, or a "quantum wormhole". We demonstrate within low-energy effective field theory that there is a precise sense in which electric fields can also thread such quantum wormholes. We define a non-perturbative "wormhole susceptibility" that measures the ease of passing an electric field through any sort of wormhole. The susceptibility of a quantum wormhole is suppressed by powers of the U(1) gauge coupling relative to that for a classical wormhole but can be made numerically equal with a sufficiently large amount of entangled matter.