Self-collision of a portal wormhole

TL;DR

This paper explores the classical behavior of portals, a type of wormhole supported by negative mass cosmic strings, showing that their self-collision leads to curvature singularities rather than topology change.

Contribution

It demonstrates that portal self-collision in general relativity results in singularities, highlighting the role of matter interactions over gravity in portal dynamics.

Findings

Self-collision causes curvature singularities.

Topology change is prevented by singularity formation.

Matter interactions are crucial in portal behavior.

Abstract

We consider the self-collision of portals in classical general relativity. Portals are wormholes supported by a single loop of negative mass cosmic string, and being wormholes, portals have a nontrivial topology. Portals can be constructed so that the curvature is zero everywhere outside the cosmic string, with vanishing ADM mass. The conical singularities of these wormholes can be smoothed, yielding a spatial topology of $S^2 \times S^1$ with a point corresponding to spatial infinity removed. If one attempts to collide the mouths of a smoothed portal to induce self-annihilation, one naively might think that a Euclidean topology is recovered, which would violate the classical no topology change theorems. We consider a particular limit of smoothed portals supported by an anisotropic fluid, and find that while the portal mouths do not experience an acceleration as they are brought close together, a curvature singularity forms in the limit that the separation distance vanishes. We find that in general relativity, the interaction between portal mouths is not primarily gravitational in nature, but depends critically on matter interactions.