Wormholes with low energy density

Abstract

In spite of their speculative nature, traversable wormholes are a topic of interest that started with the Einstein-Rosen bridge in 1935 and became a major research area with the introduction of the Morris-Thorne wormhole in 1988. It is also become apparent in time that such wormholes are likely to be compact stellar objects, akin to neutron stars. Although widely discussed, wormholes having a low energy density may therefore not be massive enough to exist on a macroscopic scale. Important examples are wormholes based on a noncommutative-geometry background and wormholes supported by the negative energy density sourced by the Casimir effect. The main goal of this paper is to invoke $f(Q)$ modified gravity to provide the extra degrees of freedom to help overcome these obstacles.