English

Electric fields and quantum wormholes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-10-07 v2

Abstract

Electric fields can thread a classical Einstein-Rosen bridge. Maldacena and Susskind have recently suggested that in a theory of dynamical gravity the entanglement of ordinary perturbative quanta should be viewed as creating a quantum version of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between the particles, or a "quantum wormhole". We demonstrate within low-energy effective field theory that there is a precise sense in which electric fields can also thread such quantum wormholes. We define a non-perturbative "wormhole susceptibility" that measures the ease of passing an electric field through any sort of wormhole. The susceptibility of a quantum wormhole is suppressed by powers of the U(1) gauge coupling relative to that for a classical wormhole but can be made numerically equal with a sufficiently large amount of entangled matter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.06336,
  title  = {Electric fields and quantum wormholes},
  author = {Dalit Engelhardt and Ben Freivogel and Nabil Iqbal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.06336},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

7 pages + appendix and refs, 6 figures; v2: references added

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:21:40.349Z