Charge and the topology of spacetime

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel class of electrically charged wormholes with non-compact boundaries, extending previous work to non-orientable and non-time-orientable spacetimes, and explores their implications for quantum theory modeling.

Contribution

It presents a new class of charged wormholes with non-compact boundaries, expanding the understanding of spacetime topology and charge without traditional hypersurfaces.

Findings

Charged wormholes can have non-compact boundary surfaces.

These wormholes can exhibit net electric charge from source-free Maxwell's equations.

The work connects spacetime topology with quantum theory modeling.

Abstract

A new class of electrically charged wormholes is described in which the outer two sphere is not spanned by a compact coorientable hypersurface. These wormholes can therefore display net electric charge from the source free Maxwell's equation. This extends the work of Sorkin on non-space orientable manifolds, to spacetimes which do not admit a time orientation. The work is motivated by the suggestion that quantum theory can be explained by modelling elementary particles as regions of spacetime with non-trivial causal structure. The simplest example of an electrically charged spacetime carries a spherical symmetry.