SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2210.06142

Creation of wormholes during the cosmological bounce

Abstract

In this work we demonstrate that wormholes can in principle be naturally created during the cosmological bounce without the need for the exotic matter or any kind of additional modifications of the gravitational sector, apart from the one enabling the cosmological bounce. This result is general and does not depend on the details of the modifications of gravitational equations needed to support the bounce. To study the possible existence of wormholes around the cosmological bounce we introduce general modifications of Einstein's field equations need to support the bouncing solutions. In this regime we show that it is possible to construct a cosmological wormhole solution supported by matter, radiation and vacuum energy, satisfying the Weak Energy Condition (WEC), which asymptotically approaches the Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric. However, at a specific cosmological time, which depends on the parameters of the bouncing cosmological model, the WEC describing the matter needed to support such wormholes is spontaneously violated. This means that such wormholes could potentially exist in large numbers during some period around the bounce, significantly changing the causal structure of space-time, and then vanish afterwards.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Petar Pavlović, Marko Sossich. 2022-10-12. Creation of wormholes during the cosmological bounce. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-023-11386-1

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc