arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to S. Krasnikov.
In their recent paper Dai and Stojkovic [arXiv:1910.00429] discuss an interesting possibility: a star near a wormhole mouth may gravitationally feel an object located near the other mouth. This means that a star's trajectory may tell an observer that the star orbits a wormhole mouth and not a black hole. I argue that within the approximation used in the paper the effect is, in fact, unobservable irrespective of how accurate the measurements are.
A number of long-standing puzzles, such as the origin of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, could perhaps be solved if we found a mechanism for effectively transferring energy from black holes to particles and, correspondingly, accelerating the latter to (unboundedly, as long as we neglect the back reaction) large velocities. As of today the only such candidate mechanism in the case of the non-extreme Kerr black hole is colliding a particle that freely falls from infinity with a particle whose trajectory is subject to some special requirements to fulfil which it has to be suitably corrected by auxiliary collisions. In the present paper we prove that---at least when the relevant particles move in the equatorial plane and experience a single correcting collision---this mechanism does not work too. The energy of the final collision becomes unboundedly high only when the energies of the incoming particles do.
In a stationary spacetime $S$ consider a pair of free falling particles that collide with the energy $E_{\rm c.m.}$ (as measured in the center-of-mass system). Let the metric of $S$ or/and the trajectories of the particles depend on a parameter $ k$. Then $S$ is said to be a "(super) accelerator" if $E_{\rm c.m.}$ grows unboundedly with $ k$, even though the energies of the particles at infinity remain bounded. The existence of naturally occurring super accelerators would make it possible to observe otherwise inaccessible phenomena. This is why in recent years a lot of spacetimes were tested on being super accelerators. In this paper a wormhole $W$ of an especially simple---and hence, hopefully, realistic---geometry is considered: it is static, spherically symmetric, its matter source is confined to a compact neighbourhood of the throat, and the $tt$-component (in the Schwarzschild coordinates) of its metric has a single minimum. It is shown that such a wormhole is a super accelerator with $ k\equiv \frac 13\ln |g_{tt\ \mathrm{min}}|$. In contrast to the rotating Teo wormhole, considered by Tsukamoto and Bambi, $W$ cannot accelerate the collision products on their way to a distant observer. On the other hand, in contrast to the black hole colliders, $W$ does not need such acceleration to make those products detectable.
The "trousers" spacetime is a pair of flat 2D cylinders ("legs") merging into into a single one ("trunk"). In spite of its simplicity this spacetime has a few features (including, in particular, a naked singularity in the "crotch") each of which is presumably unphysical, but for none of which a mechanism is known able to prevent its occurrence. Therefore it is interesting and important to study the behavior of the quantum fields in such a space. Anderson and DeWitt were the first to consider the free scalar field in the trousers spacetime. They argued that the crotch singularity produces an infinitely bright flash, which was interpreted as evidence that the topology of space is dynamically preserved. Similar divergencies were later discovered by Manogue, Copeland and Dray who used a more exotic quantization scheme. Later yet the same result obtained within a somewhat different approach led Sorkin to the conclusion that the topological transition in question is suppressed in quantum gravity. In this paper I show that the Anderson--DeWitt divergence is an artifact of their choice of the Fock space. By choosing a different one-particle Hilbert space one gets a quantum state in which the components of the stress-energy tensor (SET) are bounded in the frame of a free-falling observer.
General relativity lacks the notion of the speed of gravity. This is inconvenient and the present paper is aimed at filling this gap up. To that end I introduce the concept of the "alternative" and argue that its variety called the "superluminal alternative" describes exactly what one understands by the "superluminal gravitational signal". Another, closely related, object called the "semi-superluminal alternative" corresponds to the situation in which a massive (and therefore gravitating) body reaches its destination sooner than a photon \emph{would}, be the latter sent \emph{instead} of the body. I prove that in general relativity constrained by the condition that only globally hyperbolic spacetimes are allowed 1) semi-superluminal alternatives are absent and 2) under some natural conditions and conventions admissible superluminal alternative are absent too.
The fact that the null generators of a future Cauchy horizon are past complete was proved first by Hawking and Ellis [1]. Then Budzyński, Kondracki, and Królak outlined a proof free from an error found in the original one [2]. Finally, a week ago Minguzzi published his version of proof [3] patching a previously unnoticed hole in the preceding two. I am not aware of any flaws in that last proof, but it is quite difficult. In this note I present a simpler one.
The building of a time machine, if possible at all, requires the relevant regions of spacetime to be compact (that is, physically speaking, free from sources of unpredictability such as infinities and singularities). Motivated by this argument we consider the spacetimes with the compactly determined Cauchy horizons (CDCHs), the defining property of which is the compactness of $\overline{J^-(\EuScript U)}\cap J^+(\EuScript S_0)$, where $\EuScript U$ is an open subset of the Cauchy horizon and $\EuScript S_0$ is a Cauchy surface of the initial globally hyperbolic region $\ingh$. The following two facts are established: 1) $\ingh$ has no globally hyperbolic maximal extension. This means that by shaping appropriately a precompact portion of a globally hyperbolic region one can \emph{force} the Universe to produce either a closed causal curve, or a quasiregular singularity, whichever it abhors less; 2) Before a CDCH is formed a null geodesic appears which infinitely approaches the horizon returning again and again in the same --- arbitrarily small --- region. The energy of the photon moving on such a geodesic increases with each passage, or at least falls insufficiently fast. As a result, an observer located in the mentioned region would see a bunch of photons passing through his laboratory with the arbitrarily large total energy. We speculate that this phenomenon may have observable consequences.
Irrespective of local conditions imposed on the metric, any extendible spacetime U has a maximal extension containing no closed causal curves outside the chronological past of U. We prove this fact and interpret it as impossibility (in classical general relativity) of the time machines, insofar as the latter are defined to be causality-violating regions created by human beings (as opposed to those appearing spontaneously).
I show that there is a significant lacuna in the proof of the theorem known as "Topological Censorship" (a theorem forbidding a solution of Einstein's equations to have some topological features, such as traversable wormholes, without violating the averaged null energy condition). To fill the lacuna one would probably have to revise the class of spacetimes for which the theorem is formulated.
The question is discussed of what is the speed of gravity (at the fundamental non-perturbative level). The question is important, if nowhere else, in discussing the problem of information "lost" in black holes. It turns out that the duly defined "gravitational signal" generally may be causal, superluminal and "semi-superluminal". In the class of globally hyperbolic spacetimes the two last varieties coincide. And if some (often imposed, but not always satisfied) conditions hold, the signals may be \emph{only} causal. In this sense the speed of gravity does not exceed the speed of light.
To cure the lack of predictive power of general relativity Geroch proposed to complete the theory with an additional postulate that only "hole-free" spacetimes are permitted. I argue that this postulate is too strong -- it prohibits even the Minkowski space.
A pointlike electric charge at rest is considered in the spacetime which is a wormhole connecting two otherwise Minkowskian spaces. The potential (i. e. a solution of the Maxwell equations) is split into two parts: one of them depends only on the value and location of the charge, while the other, on the contrary, does not change when the charge is quasistatically moved. Correspondingly, the former is interpreted as being generated by the charge, and the latter as being source-free. It is shown that all source-free potentials differ in the flux through the throat (no "multipoles without multipoles"), which enables one to interpret the flux as the "charge" of the wormhole in agreement with Wheeler's concept of "charge without charge". The potential generated by the charge differs from Coulomb's and thus a force (called "self-force") acts on the charge even in the absence of the source-free field. This force is found explicitly in the limit of vanishing throat length. The result differs from that obtained recently by Khusnutdinov and Bakhmatov.
The Schwarzschild space is one of the best studied spacetimes and its exhaustive considerations are easily accessible. Nevertheless, by some reasons it is still surrounded by a lot of misconceptions, myths, and "paradoxes". In this pedagogical paper an attempt is made to give a simple (i. e., without cumbersome calculations), but rigorous consideration to the relevant questions. I argue that 1) an observer falling into a Schwarzschild black hole will \emph{not} see "the entire history of the universe" 2) he will \emph{not} cross the horizon at the speed of light 3) when inside the hole, he will \emph{not} see the (future) singularity and 4) the latter is \emph{not} "central".
The conical singularity in flat spacetime is mostly known as a model of the cosmic string or the wedge disclination in solids. Its another, equally important, function is to be a representative of quasiregular singularities. From all these of views it seems interesting to find out whether there exist other similar singularities. To specify what "similar" means I introduce the notion of the string-like singularity, which is, roughly speaking, an absolutely mild singularity concentrated on a curve or on a 2-surface S (depending on whether the space is three- of four-dimensional). A few such singularities are already known: the aforementioned conical singularity, two its Lorentzian versions, the "spinning string", the "screw dislocation", and Tod's spacetime. In all these spacetimes S is a straight line (or a plane) and one may wonder if this is an inherent property of the string-like singularities. The aim of this paper is to construct string-like singularities with less trivial S. These include flat spacetimes in which S is a spiral, or even a loop. If such singularities exist in nature (in particular, as an approximation to gravitational field of strings) their cosmological and astrophysical manifestations must differ drastically from those of the conventional cosmic strings. Likewise, being realized as topological defects in crystals such loops and spirals will probably also have rather unusual properties.
The paper has been withdrawn by the author, due to a fatal error. A horse stumbles that has four legs.
Suppose, the Universe comes into existence (as classical spacetime) already with an empty spherically symmetric macroscopic wormhole present in it. Classically the wormhole would evolve into a part of the Schwarzschild space and thus would not allow any signal to traverse it. I consider semiclassical corrections to that picture and build a model of an evaporating wormhole. The model is based on the assumption that the vacuum polarization and its backreaction on the geometry of the wormhole are weak. The lack of information about the era preceding the emergence of the wormhole results in appearance of three parameters which -- along with the initial mass -- determine the evolution of the wormhole. For some values of these parameters the wormhole turns out to be long-lived enough to be traversed and to transform into a time machine.
The possibility is discussed of superluminal motion of non-tachyonic (i.e. moving with the instantaneous speed v<c) bodies within general relativity. It is shown that in some occasions quantum field theory apparently prohibits such motion, but not - to all appearance - in the general case.
Recently the structure of the Letelier-Gal'tsov spacetime has become a matter of some controversy. I show that the metric proposed in \cite{letgal} is defined only on a dense subset of the whole manifold. In the case when it can be defined on the remainder by continuity, the resulting spacetime corresponds to a system of parallel cosmic strings at rest w.r.t. each other.