Wormholes, Energy Conditions, Topological Censorship, and all that

Abstract

We consider Einstein-Maxwell theory with a negative cosmological constant and study the possible existence of traversable wormholes in Asymptotically (locally) AdS spacetimes. It has been argued in the literature that such solutions are foliations of warped AdS$_3$ spacetimes and are supersymmetric solutions to N=2 d=4 gauged supergravity. In this talk, I will briefly go through our journey through the the geometric and physical aspects of the solutions, provide some results, as well as some failed attempts, and suggest some open questions. We find that traversability, as measured from the boundary, seems to hold, with the null energy condition being satisfied. The total electric and magnetic charge are zero in the global cover. We interpret this as two semiwormhole solutions glued together. The conformal mass blows up because of the non-compactness of the boundaries. We were not able to produce similar constructions in 5d, but found a new solution which embeds the 4d solution in 5d. In the future, we intend to test the wormholeness of the 4d solution, generalize the construction and study the new 5d solution.