Traversable wormholes: the Roman ring

Abstract

In this brief report I introduce a yet another class of geometries for which semi-classical chronology protection theorems are of dubious physical reliability. I consider a ``Roman ring'' of traversable wormholes, wherein a number of wormholes are arranged in a ring in such a manner that no subset of wormholes is near to chronology violation, though the combined system can be arbitrarily close to chronology violation. I show that (with enough wormholes in the ring) the gravitational vacuum polarization (the expectation value of the quantum stress-energy tensor) can be made arbitrarily small. In particular the back-reaction can be kept arbitrarily small all the way to the ``reliability horizon''---so that semi-classical quantum gravity becomes unreliable before the gravitational back reaction becomes large.