Acoustic Wormholes

TL;DR

This paper constructs acoustic analogs of wormholes, revealing new invariants and differences from black holes, and explores their implications for understanding curvature singularities and potential laboratory experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a formal extension of acoustic black holes to model wormholes and uncovers new acoustic invariants and differences from black hole analogs.

Findings

Identification of a new acoustic invariant for the massless Einstein-Rosen model

Marked differences between acoustic black holes and wormholes

Equivalence of light and sound ray trajectories in optical and acoustic media

Abstract

Acoustic analogs of static, spherically symmetric massive traversable Lorentzian wormholes are constructed as a {\em formal} extension of acoustic black holes. The method is straightforward but the idea is interesting in itself. The analysis leads to a new acoustic invariant for the massless counterpart of the Einstein-Rosen model of an elementary particle. It is shown that there is a marked, in a sense even counterintuitive, physical difference between the acoustic analogs of black holes and wormholes. The analogy allows us to also portray the nature of curvature singularity in the acoustic language. It is demonstrated that the light ray trajectories in an optical medium are the same as the sound trajectories in its acoustic analog. The implications of these analogies in the laboratory set up and in the different context of phantom energy accretion have been speculated.