Unimodular gravity traversable wormholes

Abstract

Wormholes are outstanding solutions of Einstein’s General Relativity. They were worked out in the late 1980s by Morris and Thorne, who have figured out a recipe that wormholes must obey in order to be traversable, that is, safely crossed by travelers. A remarkable feature is that General Relativity Theory wormholes must be filled by exotic matter, which Morris and Thorne define as matter satisfying $$-p_r>\rho$$ , in which $$p_r$$ is the radial pressure and $$\rho$$ is the energy density of the wormhole. In the present article, we introduce, for the first time in the literature, traversable wormhole solutions of Einstein’s Unimodular Gravity Theory. Unimodular Gravity was proposed by Einstein himself as the theory for which the field equations are the traceless portion of General Relativity field equations. Later, Weinberg has shown that this approach elegantly yields the solution of the infamous cosmological constant problem. The wormhole solutions here presented satisfy the metric conditions of “traversability” and remarkably evade the exotic matter condition, so we can affirm that Unimodular Gravity wormholes can be filled by ordinary matter.