Traversable wormholes: The Roman ring
Abstract
In this Brief Report I introduce yet another class of geometries for which semiclassical chronology protection theorems are of dubious physical reliability. I consider a ``Roman ring'' of traversable wormholes, wherein a number of wormholes are arranged in a ring in such a manner that no subset of wormholes is near chronology violation, though the combined system can be arbitrarily close to chronology violation. I show that (with enough wormholes in the ring) the gravitational vacuum polarization (the expectation value of the quantum stress-energy tensor) can be made arbitrarily small. In particular, the back reaction can be kept arbitrarily small all the way to the ``reliability horizon,'' so that semiclassical quantum gravity becomes unreliable before the gravitational back reaction becomes large.
- Publication:
-
Physical Review D
- Pub Date:
- April 1997
- DOI:
- arXiv:
- arXiv:gr-qc/9702043
- Bibcode:
- 1997PhRvD..55.5212V
- Keywords:
-
- 04.20.Gz;
- 04.60.-m;
- 04.62.+v;
- Spacetime topology causal structure spinor structure;
- Quantum gravity;
- Quantum field theory in curved spacetime;
- General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology;
- High Energy Physics - Theory
- E-Print:
- 4 pages