Recent progress in wormhole dynamics

Abstract

Space-time wormholes were introduced in Wheeler's idea of space-time foam. Traversible wormholes as defined by Morris & Thorne became popular as potential short cuts across the universe and even time machines. More recently, the author proposed a general theory of wormhole dynamics, unified with black-hole dynamics. This article gives a brief review of the above ideas and summarizes progress on wormhole dynamics in the last year. Firstly, a numerical study of dynamical perturbations of the first Morris-Thorne wormhole showed it to be unstable, either collapsing to a black hole or exploding to an inflationary universe. This provides a mechanism for inflating a wormhole from space-time foam to usable size. Intriguing critical behaviour was also discovered. Secondly, a wormhole solution supported by pure radiation was discovered and used to find analytic examples of dynamic wormhole processes which were also recently found in a two-dimensional dilaton gravity model: the construction of a traversible wormhole from a Schwarzschild black hole and vice versa, and the enlargement or reduction of the wormhole.