Hawking's chronology protection conjecture: singularity structure of the quantum stress--energy tensor

Calculating the van Vleck determinant in traversable wormhole spacetimes is an important ingredient in understanding the physical basis behind Hawking's chronology protection conjecture. This paper presents extensive computations of this object --- at least in the short--throat flat--space approximation. An important technical trick is to use an extension of the usual junction condition formalism to probe the full Riemann tensor associated with a thin shell of matter. Implica...

The recent interest in ``time machines'' has been largely fueled by the apparent ease with which such systems may be formed in general relativity, given relatively benign initial conditions such as the existence of traversable wormholes or of infinite cosmic strings. This rather disturbing state of affairs has led Hawking to formulate his Chronology Protection Conjecture, whereby the formation of ``time machines'' is forbidden. This paper will use several simple examples to a...

It has been claimed that wormholes are just as good a prediction of Einstein's theory as black holes, but they are subject to severe restrictions from quantum field theory. The purpose of this paper is to show that the claim can be substantiated in spite of these restrictions.

On general grounds, one may argue that a black hole stops radiation at the Planck mass, where the radiated energy is comparable to the black hole's mass. And also, it has been argued that there would be a "wormhole-like" structure, known as "space-time foam", due to large fluctuations below the Planck length. In this paper, as an explicit example, we consider an exact classical solution which represents nicely those two properties in a recently proposed quantum gravity model ...

It has been proposed that wormholes can be made to function as time-machines. This opens up the question of whether this can be accomodated within a self-consistent physics or not. In this contribution we present some quantum mechanical considerations in this respect.

This is a brief survey of the current status of Stephen Hawking's ``chronology protection conjecture''. That is: ``Why does nature abhor a time machine?'' I'll discuss a few examples of spacetimes containing ``time machines'' (closed causal curves), the sorts of peculiarities that arise, and the reactions of the physics community. While pointing out other possibilities, this article concentrates on the possibility of ``chronology protection''. As Stephen puts it: ``It seems...

We present strong arguments that the deep structure of the quantum vacuum contains a web of microscopic wormholes or short-cuts. We develop the concept of wormhole spaces and show that this web of wormholes generate a peculiar array of long-range correlations in the patterns of vacuum fluctuations on the Planck scale. We conclude that this translocal structure represents the common cause for both the BH-entropy-area law, the more general holographic principle and the entangle...

Recently a bound on negative energy densities in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime was derived for a minimally coupled, quantized, massless, scalar field in an arbitrary quantum state. The bound has the form of an uncertainty principle-type constraint on the magnitude and duration of the negative energy density seen by a timelike geodesic observer. When spacetime is curved and/or has boundaries, we argue that the bound should hold in regions small compared to the minimum l...

This paper studies the time-symmetry problem in quantum gravity. The issue depends critically on the choice of the quantum state and has been considered in this paper by restricting to the case of quantum wormholes. It is seen that pure states represented by a wave functional are time symmetric. However, a maximal analytic extension of the wormhole manifold is found that corresponds to a mixed state describable by a nondegenerate density-matrix functional that involves an ext...

Renormalized vacuum expectation values of electromagnetic stress-energy tensor are calculated in the background spherically-symmetrical metric of the wormhole's topology. Covariant geodesic point separation method of regularization is used. Violation of the weak energy condition at the throat of wormhole takes place for geometry sufficiently close to that of infinitely long wormhole of constant radius irrespectively of the detailed form of metric. This is an argument in favou...