Searching for wormholes with gravitational wave scattering

Abstract

Wormholes bridging distant places of the universe are well-known solutions of general relativity. In particular, traversable wormholes which allow interstellar traveling are also popular in science fiction. However, no hint of their existence has been found yet. In this work, we propose using the gravitational wave (GW) scattering off spherical wormholes to search for their existence. We carefully calculate the reflected and transmitted waveforms with time-independent scattering theory. Our results quantitatively show the echo signatures in the two universes on both sides of the wormhole. In a certain wormhole mass range, the transmitted wave has a unique isolated chirp without an inspiral waveform, and the reflected wave has the anti-chirp behavior, i.e., the missing of the chirping signal. We also calculate the searching range of the current and projected GW telescopes. Our method can be adapted to efficiently calculate the templates to search for wormholes.

10 pages, 8 figures. Match the published version

References in corpus (7)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Exploring the Sensitivity of Next Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors
• Observation of gravitational waves from two neutron star-black hole coalescences
• Traversable wormholes: Some simple examples
• Echoes of ECOs: gravitational-wave signatures of exotic compact objects and of quantum corrections at the horizon scale
• A recipe for echoes from exotic compact objects
• Echoes from the scattering of wavepackets on wormholes

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Stable soliton dark matter wormhole in non-minimally coupled $f(\mathcal{Q},\mathcal{T})$ gravity
• Echoes and quasi-normal modes of perturbations around Schwarzchild traversable wormholes
• Rigorous calculation of scalar scattering in Schwarzschild background: the convergence of partial-wave series and Poisson spot