Mimicking wormholes in Born-Infeld electrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that Born-Infeld electrodynamics can produce effective wormhole geometries for light rays, providing a novel analogue model of gravitational fields through nonlinear electromagnetic theory.

Contribution

It shows that in Born-Infeld theory, the effective metrics for light can form wormhole geometries, linking electromagnetic solutions to gravitational analogues in the eikonal approximation.

Findings

Effective metrics describe wormhole geometries for light in Born-Infeld theory.

Light rays are scattered or slowed down depending on impact parameter.

The wormhole geometry is related to duality invariance and differs for scalar fields.

Abstract

We compute the evolution of linear perturbations on top of a background solution of a general nonlinear electromagnetic theory. This evolution can be described in terms of two effective metrics, and we analyse under what conditions they are conformally related, so that they can be regarded as analogue models of non-trivial gravitational fields in the eikonal approximation. This is the case of Born-Infeld theory. For the background created by a static point electric charge in the Born-Infeld theory, the effective metric describes a wormhole geometry for light rays. Depending on the impact parameter, incoming light rays are either scattered to infinity or approach the wormhole slowing down their pace until they hit the charge at vanishing speed. The same effective wormhole geometry is obtained for a magnetic monopole and a dyon and we relate it to the duality invariance of Born-Infeld electromagnetism. Finally, we analyse the scalar Dirac-Born-Infeld theory and show that the effective wormhole geometry is not generated by a particle with scalar charge.