Example of a stable wormhole in general relativity

Abstract

We study a static, spherically symmetric wormhole model whose metric coincides with that of the so-called Ellis wormhole but the material source of gravity consists of a perfect fluid with negative density and a source-free radial electric or magnetic field. For a certain class of fluid equations of state, it has been shown that this wormhole model is linearly stable under both spherically symmetric perturbations and axial perturbations of arbitrary multipolarity. A similar behavior is predicted for polar nonspherical perturbations. It thus seems to be the first example of a stable wormhole model in the framework of general relativity (at least without invoking phantom thin shells as wormhole sources).