Traversable Wormholes in General Relativity

TL;DR

This paper presents new asymmetric traversable wormhole solutions in general relativity that are smooth and potentially physically realistic, unlike previous symmetric solutions requiring exotic matter or nonphysical conditions.

Contribution

It introduces asymmetric wormhole solutions with smooth fields, avoiding the nonphysical features of earlier symmetric models that needed matter with unusual properties.

Findings

Asymmetric wormholes with smooth gravitational and matter fields.

Existence of physically plausible wormhole solutions.

Potential for realistic wormhole configurations in nature.

Abstract

In [J. Blazquez-Salcedo, C. Knoll, E. Radu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126 (2021) no.10, 101102] asymptotically flat traversable wormhole solutions were obtained in the Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell theory without using phantom matter. The normalizable numerical solutions found therein require a peculiar behavior at the throat: the mirror symmetry relatively the throat leads to the nonsmoothness of gravitational and matter fields. In particular, one must postulate changing of the sign of the fermionic charge density at the throat, requiring coexistence of particle and antiparticles without annihilation and posing a membrane of matter at the throat with specific properties. Apparently this kind of configuration could not exist in nature. We show that there are wormhole solutions, which are asymmetric relative the throat and endowed by smooth gravitational and matter fields, thereby being free from all the above problems. This indicates that such wormhole configurations could also be supported in a realistic scenario.