Charge and the topology of spacetime

Abstract

A new class of electrically charged wormholes is described in which the outer two sphere is not spanned by a compact coorientable hypersurface. These wormholes can therefore display net electric charge from the source free Maxwell's equation. This extends the work of Sorkin on non-space orientable manifolds, to spacetimes which do not admit a time orientation. The work is motivated by the suggestion that quantum theory can be explained by modelling elementary particles as regions of spacetime with non-trivial causal structure. The simplest example of an electrically charged spacetime carries a spherical symmetry.