Quantum wormholes

This paper presents an application of quantum-mechanical principles to a microscopic variant of the traversable wormholes recently introduced by Morris and Thorne. The analysis, based on the surgical grafting of two Reissner-Nordström spacetimes, proceeds by using a minisuperspace model to approximate the geometry of these wormholes. The "thin shell" formalism is applied to this minisuperspace model to extract the effective Lagrangian appropriate to this one-degree-of-freedom system. This effective Lagrangian is then quantized and the wave function for the wormhole is explicitly exhibited. A slightly more general class of wormholes—corresponding to the addition of some "dust" to the wormhole throat—is analyzed by recourse to WKB techniques. In all cases discussed in this paper, the expectation value of the wormhole radius is calculated to be of the order of the Planck length. Accordingly, though these quantum wormholes are of considerable theoretical interest they do not appear to be useful as a means for interstellar travel. The results of this paper may also have a bearing on the question of topological fluctuations in quantum gravity. These calculations serve to suggest that topology-changing effects might in fact be suppressed by quantum-gravity effects.