Schwarzschild-Like Wormholes as Accelerators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a simple, static, spherically symmetric wormhole can act as a super accelerator, significantly increasing collision energies of particles, with potential observational implications unlike black hole or rotating wormhole scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of static, spherically symmetric wormholes as natural super accelerators, expanding the understanding of high-energy particle collisions in such spacetimes.

Findings

Wormholes with a specific metric minimum act as super accelerators.

Such wormholes can produce unbounded collision energies with bounded particle energies at infinity.

They differ from rotating wormholes and black holes in their acceleration and observational properties.

Abstract

In a stationary spacetime $S$ consider a pair of free falling particles that collide with the energy $E_{\rm c.m.}$ (as measured in the center-of-mass system). Let the metric of $S$ or/and the trajectories of the particles depend on a parameter $ k$. Then $S$ is said to be a "(super) accelerator" if $E_{\rm c.m.}$ grows unboundedly with $ k$, even though the energies of the particles at infinity remain bounded. The existence of naturally occurring super accelerators would make it possible to observe otherwise inaccessible phenomena. This is why in recent years a lot of spacetimes were tested on being super accelerators. In this paper a wormhole $W$ of an especially simple---and hence, hopefully, realistic---geometry is considered: it is static, spherically symmetric, its matter source is confined to a compact neighbourhood of the throat, and the $tt$-component (in the Schwarzschild coordinates) of its metric has a single minimum. It is shown that such a wormhole is a super accelerator with $ k\equiv \frac 13\ln |g_{tt\ \mathrm{min}}|$. In contrast to the rotating Teo wormhole, considered by Tsukamoto and Bambi, $W$ cannot accelerate the collision products on their way to a distant observer. On the other hand, in contrast to the black hole colliders, $W$ does not need such acceleration to make those products detectable.