2025/05/04 by Pisana, Alessandro, Shoshany, Barak, Antoniou, Stathis +2
#53C50 (Secondary) #57R65 #83C75 (Primary) #FOS: Mathematics #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geometric Topology (math.GT) #Mathematical Physics (math-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.02210
We construct a model for the nucleation of a wormhole within a Lorentzian spacetime by employing techniques from topological surgery and Morse theory. In our framework, a 0-surgery process describes the neighborhood of the nucleation point inside a compact region of spacetime, yielding a singular Lorentzian cobordism that connects two spacelike regions with different topologies. To avoid the singularity at the critical point of the Morse function, we employ the Misner trick of taking a connected sum with a closed 4-manifold -- namely \mathbbCP2 -- to obtain an everywhere nondegenerate Lorentzian metric. This connected sum replaces the naked singularity with a region containing closed timelike curves. The obtained spacetime is nonsingular, but violates all the standard energy conditions. Our construction, thus, shows that a wormhole can be "created" without singularities in classical general relativity.