Transmission of low-energy scalar waves through a traversable wormhole

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how low-energy scalar waves scatter when passing through a traversable wormhole, providing analytic formulas for transmission, reflection, and absorption, applicable to various wormhole models.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analytic approach to scalar wave scattering by traversable wormholes, including new formulas for transmission and reflection amplitudes.

Findings

Derived explicit expressions for transmission and reflection amplitudes.

Applied the method to Ellis wormhole and its generalizations.

Provided insights into wave absorption by wormholes.

Abstract

We study the scattering of low-energy massless and massive minimally coupled scalar fields by an asymptotically flat traversable wormhole. We provide a comprehensive treatment of this problem offering analytic expressions for the transmission and reflection amplitudes of the corresponding effective potential and the absorption cross section of the wormhole. Our results, which are based on a recently developed dynamical formulation of time-independent scattering theory, apply to a large class of wormhole spacetimes including a wormhole with a sharp transition, the Ellis wormhole, and a family of its generalizations.