Wormholes in Space-Time: Theory and Facts

Dear Colleagues,

The interest in the physics of wormholes has increased considerably in the last few years, boosted mainly by both the need for observationally discriminating them from other compact objects and the possibility of avoiding the violation of the energy conditions by considering modified gravitational dynamics. A variety of methods have been proposed for their empirical characterization, ranging from the analysis of gravitational waveforms or the lensing of background sources to the properties of accretion disks around them and the observation of their shadow. As a result, and analogously with black holes, which for some time were regarded as exotic solutions of the gravitational field equations, wormholes can presently be considered as a plausible physical reality. They defy our understanding of key physical principles, such as causality or the no-cloning of quantum information, and the deep implications that their existence entails are as appealing as the reasons argued for their non-existence. In fact, there is no theorem ruling out wormhole geometries.

Hoping it will serve as a basic and updated reference, this Special Issue will cover all current research avenues on this exciting field: Astrophysical and cosmological implications of wormholes, the role of dark energy and/or modified gravity for their structure, analogue and condensed matter models, extra dimensions, non-Riemannian extensions with non-metricity and/or torsion, geons, implications for the quantum theory, stability and perturbations, non-minimal couplings, accretion disks, lensing, shadows, thin-shell models, gravitational waveforms, time machines, etc. 

Dr. Gonzalo J. Olmo
Dr. Francisco S. N. Lobo
Dr. Diego Rubiera-Garcia
Guest Editors

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