No Arabic abstract
We present a polymer quantization of spherically symmetric Einstein gravity in which the polymerized variable is the area of the Einstein-Rosen wormhole throat. In the classical polymer theory, the singularity is replaced by a bounce at a radius that depends on the polymerization scale. In the polymer quantum theory, we show numerically that the area spectrum is evenly-spaced and in agreement with a Bohr-Sommerfeld semiclassical estimate, and this spectrum is not qualitatively sensitive to issues of factor ordering or boundary conditions except in the lowest few eigenvalues. In the limit of small polymerization scale we recover, within the numerical accuracy, the area spectrum obtained from a Schrodinger quantization of the wormhole throat dynamics. The prospects of recovering from the polymer throat theory a full quantum-corrected spacetime are discussed.
Adopting the throat quantization pioneered by Louko and Makela, we derive the mass and area spectra for the Schwarzschild-Tangherlini black hole and its anti-de~Sitter (AdS) generalization in arbitrary dimensions. We obtain exact spectra in three special cases: the three-dimensional BTZ black hole, toroidal black holes in any dimension, and five-dimensional Schwarzshild-Tangherlini(-AdS) black holes. For the remaining cases the spectra are obtained for large mass using the WKB approximation. For asymptotically flat black holes, the area/entropy has an equally spaced spectrum, as expected from previous work. In the asymptotically AdS case on the other hand, it is the mass spectrum that is equally spaced. Our exact results for the BTZ black hole with Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions are consistent with the spacing of the spectra of the corresponding operators in the dual CFT.
Current ground-based gravitational wave detectors are tuned to capture the collision of compact objects such as stellar origin black holes and neutron stars; over 20 such events have been published to date. Theoretically, however, more exotic compact objects may exist, collisions of which should also generate copious gravitational waves. In this paper, we model the inspiral of a stellar mass black hole into a stable, non-spinning, traversable wormhole, and find a characteristic waveform -- an anti-chirp and/or burst -- as the black hole emerges, i.e., outspirals, into our region of the Universe. This novel waveform signature may be useful in searches for wormholes in future gravitational wave data or used to constrain possible wormhole geometries in our Universe.
We present a polymer quantization of the -lambda/r^2 potential on the positive real line and compute numerically the bound state eigenenergies in terms of the dimensionless coupling constant lambda. The singularity at the origin is handled in two ways: first, by regularizing the potential and adopting either symmetric or antisymmetric boundary conditions; second, by keeping the potential unregularized but allowing the singularity to be balanced by an antisymmetric boundary condition. The results are compared to the semiclassical limit of the polymer theory and to the conventional Schrodinger quantization on L_2(R_+). The various quantization schemes are in excellent agreement for the highly excited states but differ for the low-lying states, and the polymer spectrum is bounded below even when the Schrodinger spectrum is not. We find as expected that for the antisymmetric boundary condition the regularization of the potential is redundant: the polymer quantum theory is well defined even with the unregularized potential and the regularization of the potential does not significantly affect the spectrum.
We construct the thin-shell wormhole solutions of novel four-dimensional Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet model and study their stability under radial linear perturbations. For positive Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant, the stable thin-shell wormhole can only be supported by exotic matter. For negative enough Gauss-Bonnet coupling constant, in asymptotic flat and AdS spacetime, there exists stable neutral thin-shell wormhole with normal matter which has finite throat radius. In asymptotic dS spacetime, there is no stable neutral thin-shell wormhole with normal matter. The charged thin-shell wormholes with normal matter exist in both flat, AdS and dS spacetime. Their throat radius can be arbitrarily small. However, when the charge is too large, the stable thin-shell wormhole can be supported only by exotic matter.
We numerically construct a symmetric wormhole solution in pure Einstein gravity supported by a massive $3$-form field with a potential that contains a quartic self-interaction term. The wormhole spacetimes have only a single throat and they are everywhere regular and asymptotically flat. Furthermore, their mass and throat circumference increase almost linearly as the coefficient of the quartic self-interaction term $Lambda$ increases. The amount of violation of the null energy condition (NEC) is proportional to the magnitude of $3$-form, thus the NEC is less violated as $Lambda$ increases, since the magnitude of $3$-form decreases with $Lambda$. In addition, we investigate the geodesics of particles moving around the wormhole. The unstable photon orbit is located at the throat. We also find that the wormhole can cast a shadow whose apparent size is smaller than that cast by the Schwarzschild black hole, but reduces to it when $Lambda$ acquires a large value. The behavior of the innermost stable circular orbit around this wormhole is also discussed. The results of this paper hint toward the possibility that the 3-form wormholes could be potential black hole mimickers, as long as $Lambda$ is sufficiently large, precisely when NEC is weakly violated.