We use the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approximation to study the formation and propagation of bound states in the vicinity of a wormhole in the non-minimal derivative coupling theory of gravity. The wormhole throat connects two Anti-de Sitter spacetimes. We show that when the scalar field lies in high orbital states, the corresponding potential has potential barriers that block the passage of a classical field. We investigate the behaviour of the bound states trapped in the potential wells and provide the flow between the two AdS regions.
We construct an eternal traversable wormhole connecting two asymptotically $\text{AdS}_4$ regions. The wormhole is dual to the ground state of a system of two identical holographic CFT's coupled via a single low-dimension operator. The coupling between the two CFT's leads to negative null energy in the bulk, which supports a static traversable wormhole. As the ground state of a simple Hamiltonian, it may be possible to make these wormholes in the lab or on a quantum computer.
We attempt to construct eternal traversable wormholes connecting two asymptotically AdS regions by introducing a static coupling between their dual CFTs. We prove that there are no semiclassical traversable wormholes with Poincaré invariance in the boundary directions in higher than two spacetime dimensions. We critically examine the possibility of evading our result by coupling a large number of bulk fields. Static, traversable wormholes with less symmetry may be possible, and could be constructed using the ingredients we develop here.
In this paper, we study the Lorentzian AdS wormhole solutions constructed in arXiv:0808.2481 [hep-th]. Each of them is a classical solution interpolating between an AdS space and a flat space in type IIB supergravity. We calculate the holographic entanglement entropy to probe this geometry. Our analysis shows that there exits a mass gap in its holographic dual gauge theory and that the entanglement between the two boundaries is rather suppressed than that we naively expect for wormholes. We also examine the holographic conductivity on a probe D-brane in this spacetime.
There are two important examples of physical systems which violate the strong energy condition : Universes (like, it would seem, our own) with a positive cosmological constant, and wormholes. We suggest that a positive cosmological constant can be reconciled with string theory by considering wormholes in string backgrounds. This is argued in two directions : first, we show that brane-worlds with positive cosmological constants give rise to bulk singularities which are best resolved by embedding the brane-world in an AdS/CFT wormhole; and second, for the simplest kind of wormhole in an asymptot…
In this work we have derived a class of geometries which describe black holes and wormholes in Randall-Sundrum-type brane models, focusing mainly on asymptotically anti-de Sitter backgrounds. We show that by continuously deforming the usual four dimensional vacuum background, a specific family of solutions is obtained. Maximal extensions of the solutions are presented, and their causal structures are discussed.
We present several classes of exact solutions in the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system with a cosmological constant. The spacetime has spherical, plane, or hyperbolic symmetry and the higher-dimensional solutions are obtained in a closed form only in the plane symmetric case. Among them, the class-I solution represents an asymptotically locally anti-de Sitter (AdS) dynamical black hole or wormhole. In four and higher dimensions, the generalized Misner-Sharp quasi-local mass blows up at AdS infinity, inferring that the spacetime is only locally AdS. In three dimensions, the scalar field becomes triv…
We study and construct spacetimes, dubbed planar AdS-dS-wormholes, satisfying the null energy condition and having two asymptotically AdS boundaries connected through a (non-traversable) inflating wormhole. As for other wormholes, it is natural to expect dual descriptions in terms of two disconnected CFTs in appropriate entangled states. But for our cases certain expected bulk entangling surfaces used by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi (HRT) prescription to compute CFT entropy do not exist. In particular, no real codimension-2 extremal surface can run from one end of the wormhole to the other.…
We study four coupled SYK models and nearly AdS$_2$ gravities. In the SYK model side, we construct a model that couples two copies of two coupled SYK models. In nearly AdS$_2$ gravity side, we entangle matter fields in two copies of traversable wormholes. In both cases, the systems show first order phase transitions at zero temperature by changing couplings, which is understood as the exchange of traversable wormhole configurations. In nearly AdS$_2$ gravity cases, by exchanging the role of space and time the wormholes are interpreted as bra-ket wormholes. In Lorentzian signature, these bra-ke…
It has long been known that the coarse-grained approximation to the black hole density of states can be computed using classical Euclidean gravity. In this work we argue for another entry in the dictionary between Euclidean gravity and black hole physics, namely that Euclidean wormholes describe a coarse-grained approximation to the energy level statistics of black hole microstates. To do so we use the method of constrained instantons to obtain an integral representation of wormhole amplitudes in Einstein gravity and in full-fledged AdS/CFT. These amplitudes are non-perturbative corrections to…
We study the matter perturbations of a new AdS wormhole in (3+1)-dimensional Einstein-Born-Infeld gravity, called "natural wormhole", which does not require exotic matters. We discuss the stability of the perturbations by numerically computing the quasi-normal modes (QNMs) of a massive scalar field in the wormhole background. We investigate the dependence of quasi-normal frequencies on the mass of scalar field as well as other parameters of the wormhole. It is found that the perturbations are always stable for the wormhole geometry which has the general relativity (GR) limit when the scalar fi…
We present the complete family of solutions of 3D gravity (Lambda<0) with two asymptotically AdS exterior regions. The solutions are constructed from data at the two boundaries, which correspond to two independent and arbitrary stress tensors T_R, \bar T_R, and T_L, \bar T_L. The two exteriors are smoothly joined on to an interior region through a regular horizon. We find CFT duals of these geometries which are entangled states of two CFT's. We compute correlators between general operators at the two boundaries and find perfect agreement between CFT and bulk calculations. We calculate and matc…
The holographic duals of Entanglement of Purification through the Entanglement Wedge Cross Section has been a well-discussed topic in the literature recently. More general entanglement measures involving multipartite information and their holographic duals have also been proposed. On the other hand, the recent intriguing program reproducing the Page Curve in Black hole entropy using the notion of islands has also been an obvious issue of attraction. A toy model involving Multiboundary wormholes in AdS$_{3}$ was able to capture many interesting facts about such calculations. In such a toy model…
It has been argued i) that Lorentz-signature solutions with wormholes connecting n asymptotically AdS regions describe bulk quantum states dual to n entangled but non-interacting CFTs and ii) that such bulk wormhole states should be identified with similar entangled but non-interacting bulk systems, each describing quantum geometries with only a single asymptotic region. But if the wormhole is to behave semiclassically, we show that conjecture (ii) cannot hold. Instead, the theory of asymptotically AdS bulk quantum gravity must admit superselection sectors with respect to the CFT observables t…
We show that Euclidean axion wormholes in theories of gravity coupled to a single axion have several independent inhomogeneous perturbations that lower the Euclidean action. Our analysis relies on a judiciously chosen gauge-invariant variable which makes the negative mode structure about axion wormholes transparent. Perturbations lowering the action are concentrated in the neck region and exist for wormholes in flat space and in AdS. Their presence means axion wormholes are not relevant saddle points of the functional integral in quantum gravity. This resolves the paradoxes associated with the…
We describe a class of wormholes that generically become traversable after incorporating gravitational back-reaction from linear quantum fields satisfying appropriate (periodic or anti-periodic) boundary conditions around a non-contractible cycle, but with natural boundary conditions at infinity (i.e., without additional boundary interactions). The class includes both asymptotically flat and asymptotically AdS examples. Simple asymptotically AdS$_3$ or asymptotically AdS$_3 \times S^1$ examples with a single periodic scalar field are then studied in detail. When the examples admit a smooth ext…
In this work we show the existence of asymptotically AdS wormhole geometries where the scalar probe has an equispaced, fully resonant spectrum, as that of a scalar on AdS spacetime, and explore its dynamics when non-linearities are included. The spacetime is a solution of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory with a single maximally symmetric vacuum. Introducing a non-minimal coupling between the scalar probe and the Ricci scalar remarkably leads to a fully resonant spectrum for a scalar field fulfilling reflective boundary conditions at both infinities. Applying perturbative methods, which are particu…
The stability of certain class of asymptotically AdS wormholes in vacuum against scalar field perturbations is analyzed. For a free massive scalar field, the stability of the perturbation is guaranteed provided the squared mass is bounded from below by a negative quantity. Depending on the base manifold of the AdS asymptotics, this lower bound could be more stringent than the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. An exact expression for the spectrum is found analytically. For a scalar field perturbation with a nonminimal coupling, slow fall-off asymptotic behavior is also allowed, provided the squared…
The two-sided BTZ black hole has been instrumental in elucidating several aspects of AdS/CFT. Similarly, multiboundary wormholes provide a useful and rich arena in which probing questions of quantum gravity can be posed and explored. In this work, we find the explicit forms of the Killing vectors needed to construct three-boundary wormholes, with and without rotation, as quotients of AdS$_3$. We ensure that our method captures the full moduli space of such wormholes and elaborate on the generalization of our procedure to more exotic multiboundary spaces, including higher genus.
A fundamental issue in the AdS/CFT correspondence is the wormhole growth paradox. Susskind's conjectured resolution of the paradox was to equate the volume of the wormhole with the circuit complexity of its dual quantum state in the CFT. We study the ramifications of this conjecture from a complexity-theoretic perspective. Specifically we give evidence for the existence of computationally pseudorandom states in the CFT, and argue that wormhole volume is measureable in a non-physical but computational sense, by amalgamating the experiences of multiple observers in the wormhole. In other words t…
We study Lorentzian wormholes in the ghost-free bigravity theory described by two metrics, g and f. Wormholes can exist if only the null energy condition is violated, which happens naturally in the bigravity theory since the graviton energy-momentum tensors do not apriori fulfill any energy conditions. As a result, the field equations admit solutions describing wormholes whose throat size is typically of the order of the inverse graviton mass. Hence, they are as large as the universe, so that in principle we might all live in a giant wormhole. The wormholes can be of two different types that w…
By choosing an appropriate vielbein basis, we obtain a class of spherically-symmetric solutions in $f(T)$ gravities. The solutions are asymptotic to Minkowski spacetimes with leading falloffs the same as those of the Schwarzschild black hole. In general, these solutions have branch-cut singularities in the middle. For appropriately chosen $f(T)$ functions, extremal black holes can also emerge. Furthermore, we obtain wormhole configurations whose spatial section is analogous to an Ellis wormhole, but $-g_{tt}$ runs from 0 to 1 as the proper radial coordinate runs from $-\infty$ to $+\infty$. Th…
By combining analytical and numerical methods we find that the solutions of the complete Horava theory with negative cosmological constant that satisfy the conditions of staticity, spherical symmetry and vanishing of the shift function are two kinds of geometry: (i) a wormhole-like solution with two sides joined by a throat and (ii) a single side with a naked singularity at the origin. We study the second-order effective action. We consider the case when the coupling constant of the (partial ln N)^2 term, which is the unique deviation from general relativity in the effective action, is small. …
For two-dimensional holographic CFTs, we demonstrate the role of Berry phases for relating the non-factorization of the Hilbert space to the presence of wormholes. The wormholes are characterized by a non-exact symplectic form that gives rise to the Berry phase. For wormholes connecting two spacelike regions in gravitational spacetimes, we find that the non-exactness is linked to a variable appearing in the phase space of the boundary CFT. This variable corresponds to a loop integral in the bulk. Through this loop integral, non-factorization becomes apparent in the dual entangled CFTs. Further…
We study two-sided static wormholes with an exact Killing symmetry that translates both mouths of the wormhole toward the future. This differs from the familiar Kruskal wormhole whose time translation is future-directed only in one asymptotic region and is instead past-directed in the other. Our spacetimes are solutions to Einstein-Hilbert gravity sourced by scalar domain walls. Explicit examples are found in the thin wall approximation. More generally, we show that such spacetimes can arise in the presence of scalar fields with potentials that are $C^1$ but not $C^2$ and find examples numeric…
We reconsider the role of wormholes in the AdS/CFT correspondence. We focus on Euclidean wormholes that connect two asymptotically AdS or hyperbolic regions with $\mathbb{S}^1\times \mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ boundary. There is no solution to Einstein's equations of this sort, as the wormholes possess a modulus that runs to infinity. To find on-shell wormholes we must stabilize this modulus, which we can do by fixing the total energy on the two boundaries. Such a wormhole gives the saddle point approximation to a non-standard problem in quantum gravity, where we fix two asymptotic boundaries and constr…
We construct traversable thin-shell wormholes which are asymptotically Ads/dS applying the cut and paste procedure for the case of an acoustic metric created by a relativistic Bose-Einstein condensate. We examine several definitions of the flare-out condition along with the violation or not of the energy conditions for such relativistic geometries. Under reasonable assumptions about the equation of state of the matter located at the shell, we concentrate on the mechanical stability of wormholes under radial perturbation preserving the original spherical symmetry. To do so, we consider lineariz…
We present an exactly soluble charged wormhole model in two dimensions by adding infalling chiral fermions on the static wormhole. The infalling energy due to the infalling charged matter requires the classical back reaction of the geometry, which is solved by taking into account of the nontrivial nonchiral exotic energy. Finally, we obtain the exact expression for the size of the throat depending on the total amount of the infalling net energy and discuss the interesting transition from the AdS spacetime to the wormhole geometry.
In this paper we study a class of wormhole solutions called generalized Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes in the context of asymptotically safe gravity (ASG). These solutions are characterized by two parameters: an even number $n$ and the wormhole throat radius $r_t$. The particular case $n=2$ recovers the usual Ellis-Bronnikov spacetime, which has already been addressed in the literature. We analyzed the nature of matter in the wormhole's throat, and in nearby regions, of these generalized solutions with $n>2$, using three curvature scalars in the ASG approach, namely, the Ricci scalar, squared Ricci…
We construct a single-boundary wormhole geometry in type IIB supergravity by perturbing two stacks of $N$ extremal D3-branes in the decoupling limit. The solution interpolates from a two-sided planar AdS-Schwarzschild geometry in the interior, through a harmonic two-center solution in the intermediate region, to an asymptotic AdS space. The construction involves a CPT twist in the gluing of the wormhole to the exterior throats that gives a global monodromy to some coordinates, while preserving orientability. The geometry has a dual interpretation in $\mathcal{N}=4$ $SU(2N)$ Super Yang-Mills th…
We use Euclidean path integrals to explore the set of bulk asymptotically AdS spacetimes with good CFT duals. We consider simple bottom-up models of bulk physics defined by Einstein-Hilbert gravity coupled to thin domain walls and restrict to solutions with spherical symmetry. The cosmological constant is allowed to change across the domain wall, modeling more complicated Einstein-scalar systems where the scalar potential has multiple minima. In particular, the cosmological constant can become positive in the interior. However, in the above context, we show that inflating bubbles are never pro…
We analyze the 1+1 CFT states dual to hot (time-symmetric) 2+1 multiboundary AdS wormholes. These are black hole geometries with high local temperature, $n \ge 1$ asymptotically-AdS$_3$ regions, and arbitrary internal topology. The dual state at $t=0$ is defined on $n$ circles. We show these to be well-described by sewing together tensor networks corresponding to thermofield double states. As a result, the entanglement is spatially localized and bipartite: away from particular boundary points ("vertices") any small connected region $A$ of the boundary CFT is entangled only with another small c…
We have previously proposed that asymptotically AdS 3D wormholes and black holes can be analytically continued to the Euclidean signature. The analytic continuation procedure was described for non-rotating spacetimes, for which a plane t=0 of time symmetry exists. The resulting Euclidean manifolds turned out to be handlebodies whose boundary is the Schottky double of the geometry of the t=0 plane. In the present paper we generalize this analytic continuation map to the case of rotating wormholes. The Euclidean manifolds we obtain are quotients of the hyperbolic space by a certain quasi-Fuchsia…
In this paper we study the traversability of a wormhole in the context of Asymptotically Safe Gravity (ASG) for two different cases, namely, the spherical case and the pseudospherical case. We carried out an analysis in the throat of the wormhole with an specific choice of the cutoff function $f=ξR$. Recently, this study has been performed in Ref \cite{Moti:2020whf}, however the authors consider only a classical source with constant state parameter $ω$. Here we have generalized their study in two ways: a) with a classical state parameter which is dependent of the position $ω(r)$ and b) with an…
In this letter we point out the existence of solutions to General Relativity with a negative cosmological constant in four dimensions, which contain solitons as well as traversable wormholes. The latter connect two asymptotically locally AdS$_{4}$ spacetimes. At every constant value of the radial coordinate the spacetime is a spacelike warped AdS$_{3}$. We compute the dual energy momentum tensor at each boundary showing that it yields different results. We also show that these vacuum wormholes can have more than one throat and that they are indeed traversable by computing the time it takes for…
In the 1980's, work by Coleman and by Giddings and Strominger linked the physics of spacetime wormholes to `baby universes' and an ensemble of theories. We revisit such ideas, using features associated with a negative cosmological constant and asymptotically AdS boundaries to strengthen the results, introduce a change in perspective, and connect with recent replica wormhole discussions of the Page curve. A key new feature is an emphasis on the role of null states. We explore this structure in detail in simple topological models of the bulk that allow us to compute the full spectrum of associat…
We construct stationary Ricci-flat inter-universe Lorentzian wormhole solutions in all D\ge 5 dimensions that connect two flat asymptotic spacetimes. Such a solution can be viewed as the gravity dual of a string tachyon state whose linear momentum is larger than its tension. We focus our analysis on the D=5 wormholes which are not traversable for the timelike and null geodesics; however, we demonstrate that there exist accelerated timelike trajectories that traverse from one asymptotic region to the other. We further study the minimally-coupled scalar wave equation and demonstrate that the qua…
In the present work we investigate wormhole configurations described by a constant redshift function in Einstein-Cubic gravity ({\sf ECG}). We derive analytical wormhole geometries by assuming a particular equation of state ({\sf EoS}) and investigate the possibility that these solutions satisfy the standard energy conditions. We introduce exact asymptotically flat and anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes that admit traversable wormholes. These solutions are obtained by imposing suitable values for the parameters of the theory so that the resulted geometries satisfy the weak energy condition ({\sf …
We present a self-gravitating, analytic and globally regular Skyrmion solution of the Einstein-Skyrme system with winding number w = 1, in presence of a cosmological constant. The static spacetime metric is the direct product RxS3 and the Skyrmion is the self-gravitating generalization of the static hedgehog solution of Manton and Ruback with unit topological charge. This solution can be promoted to a dynamical one in which the spacetime is a cosmology of the Bianchi type-IX with time-dependent scale and squashing coefficients. Remarkably, the Skyrme equations are still identically satisfied f…
We study higher-dimensional traversable wormholes in the context of Rindler-AdS/CFT. The hyperbolic slicing of a pure AdS geometry can be thought of as a topological black hole that is dual to a conformal field theory in the hyperbolic space. The maximally extended geometry contains two exterior regions (the Rindler wedges of AdS) which are connected by a wormhole. We show that this wormhole can be made traversable by a double trace deformation that violates the average null energy condition (ANEC) in the bulk. We find an analytic formula for the ANEC violation that generalizes Gao-Jafferis-Wa…
We prove a positive volume theorem for asymptotically AdS spacetimes: the maximal volume slice has nonnegative vacuum-subtracted volume, and the vacuum-subtracted volume vanishes if and only if the spacetime is identically pure AdS. Under the Complexity=Volume proposal, this constitutes a positive holographic complexity theorem. The result features a number of parallels with the positive energy theorem, including the assumption of an energy condition that excludes false vacuum decay (the AdS weak energy condition). Our proof is rigorously established in broad generality in four bulk dimensions…
We consider static spherically symmetric wormhole configurations in a gravitational theory of a scalar field with a potential $V(ϕ)$ and nonminimal derivative coupling to the curvature describing by the term $(εg_{μν} + κG_{μν}) ϕ^{,μ}ϕ^{,ν}$ in the action. We show that the flare-out conditions providing the geometry of a wormhole throat could fulfilled both if $ε=-1$ (phantom scalar) and $ε=+1$ (ordinary scalar). Supposing additionally a traversability, we construct numerical solutions describing traversable wormholes in the model with arbitrary $κ$, $ε=-1$ and $V(ϕ)=0$ (no potential). The tr…
We construct a nearly-$AdS_2$ solution describing an eternal traversable wormhole. The solution contains negative null energy generated by quantum fields under the influence of an external coupling between the two boundaries. In parallel, we discuss two SYK systems coupled by a relevant interaction. The physics of the two cases is very similar. They both share a "gravitational" subsector which is identical. The solution within this subsector sets the stage for dynamics which is almost conformal invariant. We study this system in detail, both in gravity and in the SYK model. The coupled SYK mod…