No Arabic abstract
We analyze the nonlinear evolution of spherically symmetric wormhole solutions coupled to a massless ghost scalar field using numerical methods. In a previous article we have shown that static wormholes with these properties are unstable with respect to linear perturbations. Here we show that depending on the initial perturbation the wormholes either expand or decay to a Schwarzschild black hole. We estimate the time scale of the expanding solutions and the ones collapsing to a black hole and show that they are consistent in the regime of small perturbations with those predicted from perturbation theory. In the collapsing case, we also present a systematic study of the final black hole horizon and discuss the possibility for a luminous signal to travel from one universe to the other and back before the black hole forms. In the expanding case, the wormholes seem to undergo an exponential expansion, at least during the run time of our simulations.
In previous work, we analyzed the linear and nonlinear stability of static, spherically symmetric wormhole solutions to Einsteins field equations coupled to a massless ghost scalar field. Our analysis revealed that all these solutions are unstable with respect to linear and nonlinear spherically symmetric perturbations and showed that the perturbation causes the wormholes to either decay to a Schwarzschild black hole or undergo a rapid expansion. Here, we consider charged generalization of the previous models by adding to the gravitational and ghost scalar field an electromagnetic one. We first derive the most general static, spherically symmetric wormholes in this theory and show that they give rise to a four-parameter family of solutions. This family can be naturally divided into subcritical, critical and supercritical solutions depending on the sign of the sum of the asymptotic masses. Then, we analyze the linear stability of these solutions. We prove that all subcritical and all critical solutions possess one exponentially in time growing mode. It follows that all subcritical and critical wormholes are linearly unstable. In the supercritical case we provide numerical evidence for the existence of a similar unstable mode.
We examine the linear stability of static, spherically symmetric wormhole solutions of Einsteins field equations coupled to a massless ghost scalar field. These solutions are parametrized by the areal radius of their throat and the product of the masses at their asymptotically flat ends. We prove that all these solutions are unstable with respect to linear fluctuations and possess precisely one unstable, exponentially in time growing mode. The associated time scale is shown to be of the order of the wormhole throat divided by the speed of light. The nonlinear evolution is analyzed in a subsequent article.
We explore the possibility that traversable wormholes be supported by specific equations of state responsible for the present accelerated expansion of the Universe, namely, phantom energy, the generalized Chaplygin gas, and the van der Waals quintessence equation of state.
In this paper, we initiate the study of the instability of naked singularities without symmetries. In a series of papers, Christodoulou proved that naked singularities are not stable in the context of the spherically symmetric Einstein equations coupled with a massless scalar field. We study in this paper the next simplest case: a characteristic initial value problem of this coupled system with the initial data given on two intersecting null cones, the incoming one of which is assumed to be spherically symmetric and singular at its vertex, and the outgoing one of which has no symmetries. It is shown that, arbitrarily fixing the initial scalar field, the set of the initial conformal metrics on the outgoing null cone such that the maximal future development does not have any sequences of closed trapped surfaces approaching the singularity, is of first category in the whole space in which the shear tensors are continuous. Such a set can then be viewed as exceptional, although the exceptionality is weaker than the at least $1$ co-dimensionality in spherical symmetry. Almost equivalently, it is also proved that, arbitrarily fixing an incoming null cone $underline{C}_varepsilon$ to the future of the initial incoming null cone, the set of the initial conformal metrics such that the maximal future development has at least one closed trapped surface before $underline{C}_varepsilon$, contains an open and dense subset of the whole space. Since the initial scalar field can be chosen such that the singularity is naked if the initial shear is set to be zero, we may say that the spherical naked singularities of a self-gravitating scalar field are not stable under gravitational perturbations. This in particular gives new families of non-spherically symmetric gravitational perturbations different from the original spherically symmetric scalar perturbations given by Christodoulou.
We discuss several features of the propagation of perturbations in nonlinear scalar field theories using the effective metric. It is shown that the effective metric can be classified according to whether the gradient of the scalar field is timelike, null, or spacelike, and this classification is illustrated with two examples. We shall also show that different signatures for the effective metric are allowed.