Scalar Fields as Sources for Wormholes and Regular Black Holes

Abstract

We review nonsingular static, spherically symmetric solutions of general relativity with minimally coupled scalar fields. Considered are wormholes and regular black holes (BHs) without a center, including black universes (BHs with expanding cosmology beyond the horizon). Such configurations require a “ghost” field with negative kinetic energy K. Ghosts can be invisible under usual conditions if K < 0 only in strong-field region (“trapped ghost”), or they rapidly decay at large radii. Before discussing particular examples, some general results are presented, such as the necessity of anisotropic matter for asymptotically flat or AdS wormholes, no-hair and global structure theorems for BHs with scalar fields. The stability properties of scalar wormholes and regular BHs under spherical perturbations are discussed. It is stressed that the effective potential V eff for perturbations has universal shapes near generic wormhole throats (a positive pole regularizable by a Darboux transformation) and near transition surfaces from canonical to ghost scalar field behavior (a negative pole at which the perturbation finiteness requirement plays a stabilizing role). Positive poles of V eff emerging at “long throats” (with the radius r ≈ r 0 + const · x 2 n , n > 1 , x = 0 is the throat) may be regularized by repeated Darboux transformations for some values of n.