Charged wormholes with non-minimally coupled scalar fields. Existence and stability

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the existence of charged, traversable wormholes with nonminimally coupled scalar fields in general relativity, but finds they are unstable due to divergence of the effective gravitational constant.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of charged wormholes with nonminimal scalar coupling and examines their stability under spherical perturbations.

Findings

Charged wormholes exist in nonminimally coupled scalar field models.

These wormholes are unstable under spherical perturbations.

Instability is linked to divergence of the effective gravitational constant.

Abstract

Static, spherically symmetric, traversable wormhole solutions with electric or magnetic charges are shown to exist in general relativity in the presence of scalar fields nonminimally coupled to gravity. These wormholes, however, turn out to be unstable under spherically symmetric perturbations. The instability is related to blowing-up of the effective gravitational constant on a certain sphere.