Schwarzschild geometry counterpart in semiclassical gravity

TL;DR

This paper explores how vacuum polarization effects modify Schwarzschild geometry in semiclassical gravity, revealing wormhole-like solutions replacing event horizons with potential implications for stellar models.

Contribution

It introduces a regularized Polyakov RSET to find semiclassical vacuum solutions, uncovering wormhole geometries replacing classical black hole horizons.

Findings

Wormhole solutions replace event horizons in semiclassical vacuum spacetimes.

Regularized RSET permits arbitrarily small wormhole throats.

No solutions with well-defined Cauchy surfaces exist in these models.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of vacuum polarization on vacuum static spherically-symmetric spacetimes. We start from the Polyakov approximation to the renormalized stress-energy tensor (RSET) of a minimally coupled massless scalar field. This RSET is not regular at $r=0$, so we define a regularized version of the Polyakov RSET. Using this Regularized RSET, and under the previous symmetry assumptions, we find all the solutions to the semiclassical field equations in vacuum. The resulting counterpart to the Schwarzschild classical geometry substitutes the presence of an event horizon by a wormhole throat that connects an external asymptotically flat region with an internal asymptotic region possessing a naked singularity: there are no semiclassical vacuum solutions with well-defined Cauchy surfaces. We also show that the Regularized Polyakov RSET allows for wormhole geometries of arbitrarily small throat radius. This analysis paves the way to future investigations of proper stellar configurations with an internal non-vacuum region.