12-04, 15:00–15:20 (Europe/Luxembourg), Banquet Room
Traversable Wormholes (TW) are solutions of the Einstein Field Equations. Even if they are not yet discovered, they represent an interesting research line especially after the discovery of Gravitational Waves. Indeed, there are proposals which consider TW as sources for Gravitational Waves. In addition to this remarkable research field, TW are also interesting because they have peculiar properties that other astrophysical objects do not have, namely they can create short-cuts between distant regions of the space-time. This amazing property can be satisfied at the price of introducing a particular kind of source dubbed as Exotic matter. We know that such a matter has not yet discovered, however one can invoke the Casimir energyt which behaves like the Exotic matter. The physics of the Casimir energy has a large plethora of applications. In this talk, we would like to propose such an energy source as a possible source powering a TW. This idea has been proposed for the first time in two pioneering papers: M.S. Morris and K.S.Thorne, Am. J.Phys. 56, 395 (1988), "Wormholes in space-time and their use for interstellar travel: A tool for teaching general relativity" and M.S. Morris, K.S. Thorne and U. Yurtsever, Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 1446 (1988), "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition". Also the book of M. Visser, Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking (American Institute of Physics, New York), 1995 is an excellent example about the physics of TW. However, we have to wait for 2019 when the candidate speaker of this talk proposed to search which kind of TW could be associated with a Casimir source. The result was published in Eur.Phys.J.C 79} (2019) 11, 951 under the title "Casimir Wormholes". A discrete degree of curiosity has been arised by such a publication (98 citations on Spires). In this talk we would like to show how some modifications on Casimir Wormholes can take the paradigm “traversable in principle” a little bit more closer to the possibility of being “traversable in practice”.
