On black bounces, wormholes and partly phantom scalar fields

TL;DR

This paper applies the black bounce regularization technique to scalar field solutions in general relativity, resulting in regular black holes and wormholes with scalar fields that transition between phantom and canonical behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces new regular solutions for scalar field and dilatonic black hole metrics using the black bounce method, including scalar fields with trapped ghost properties.

Findings

Regularized Fisher solution becomes a traversable wormhole.

New static, spherically symmetric solutions with scalar fields and magnetic fields.

Any static, spherically symmetric metric can be generated as an exact solution.

Abstract

Simpson and Visser recently proposed a phenomenological way to avoid some kinds of space-time singularities by replacing a parameter whose zero value corresponds to a singularity (say, $r$) with the manifestly nonzero expression $r(u) = \sqrt{u^2 + b^2}$, where $u$ is a new coordinate, and $b =$ \const $>0$. This trick, generically leading to a regular minimum of $r$ beyond a black hole horizon (called a "black bounce"), may hopefully mimic some expected results of quantum gravity, and was previously applied to regularize the Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstr\"om, Kerr and some other metrics. In this paper it is applied to regularize the Fisher solution with a massless canonical scalar field in general relativity (resulting in a traversable wormhole) and a family of static, spherically symmetric dilatonic black holes (resulting in regular black holes and wormholes). These new regular metrics represent exact solutions of general relativity with a sum of stress-energy tensors of a scalar field with a nonzero self-interaction potential and a magnetic field in the framework of nonlinear electrodynamics with a Lagrangian function $L(F)$, $F = F_{\mu\nu} F^{\mu\nu}$. A novel feature in the present study is that the scalar fields involved have "trapped ghost" properties, that is, are phantom in a strong-field region and canonical outside it, with a smooth transition between the regions. It is also shown that any static, spherically symmetric metric can be obtained as an exact solution to the Einstein equations with the stress-energy tensor of the above field combination.