Wormholes and Time Travel? Not Likely

A unified framework for black holes and traversible wormholes is described, where both are locally defined by outer trapping horizons, two-way traversible for wormholes and one-way traversible for black or white holes. In a two-dimensional dilaton gravity model, examples are given of: construction of wormholes from black holes; operation of wormholes for transport, including back-reaction; maintenance of an operating wormhole; and collapse of wormholes to black holes. In sphe...

The recently proposed ER=EPR correspondence postulates the existence of wormholes (Einstein-Rosen bridges) between entangled states (such as EPR pairs). Entanglement is famously known to be unobservable in quantum mechanics, in that there exists no observable (or, equivalently, projector) that can accurately pick out whether a generic state is entangled. Many features of the geometry of spacetime, however, are observables, so one might worry that the presence or absence of a ...

Some problems of the space-time causal structure are discussed using models with traversable wormholes. For this purpose the conditions of traversable wormhole matching with the exterior space-time are considered in detail and a mixed boundary problem for the Einstein equations is formulated and analyzed. The influence of these matching conditions on the space-time properties and causal structure is analyzed. These conditions have a non-dynamical nature and cannot be determin...

A dynamical theory of traversable wormholes is detailed in spherical symmetry. Generically a wormhole consists of a tunnel of trapped surfaces between two mouths, defined as temporal outer trapping horizons with opposite senses, in mutual causal contact. In static cases, the mouths coincide as the throat of a Morris-Thorne wormhole, with surface gravity providing an invariant measure of the radial curvature or "flaring-out". The null energy condition must be violated at a wor...

The purpose of this paper is to obtain exact solutions of the Einstein field equations describing traversable wormholes supported by phantom energy. Their relationship to exact solutions in the literature is also discussed, as well as the conditions required to determine such solutions.

Traversable wormholes necessarily require violations of the averaged null energy condition; this being the definition of ``exotic matter''. However, the theorems which guarantee the energy condition violation are remarkably silent when it comes to making quantitative statements regarding the ``total amount'' of energy condition violating matter in the spacetime. We develop a suitable measure for quantifying this notion, and demonstrate the existence of spacetime geometries co...

General Relativity is contaminated with non-trivial geometries which generate closed timelike curves. These apparently violate causality, producing time-travel paradoxes. We shall briefly discuss these geometries and analyze some of their physical aspects.

Wormholes are extremely attractive objects for research, and although many mathematical and physical properties of these objects have been discovered and studied in the recent decades, there remain many unsolved problems and opportunities of interest. The Special issue of Universe entitled ``Recent Advances in Wormhole Physics,'' containing 14 contributions, is aimed at enlightening some recent results in selected areas of wormhole physics.

In a previous paper, we showed that a class of time travel paradoxes which cannot be resolved using Novikov's self-consistency conjecture can be resolved by assuming the existence of multiple histories or parallel timelines. However, our proof was obtained using a simplistic toy model, which was formulated using contrived laws of physics. In the present paper we define and analyze a new model of time travel paradoxes, which is more compatible with known physics. This model co...

In this work we analyze traversable wormhole spacetimes in the framework of a covariant generalization of Einstein's General Relativity known as energy-momentum squared gravity, or $f\left(R,\mathcal T\right)$ gravity, where $R$ is the Ricci scalar, $\mathcal T=T_{ab}T^{ab}$, and $T_{ab}$ is the energy-momentum tensor. Considering a linear $f\left(R,\mathcal T\right)=R+\gamma \mathcal T$ form, we show that a wide variety of wormhole solutions for which the matter fields satis...