
2The Shadow of Charged Traversable Wormholes
The first work on what we now call wormhole was published by A. Einstein
and N. Rosen [5] in 1935. They tried to construct a model for an elemen-
tary particle that could be everywhere finite and free of singularities. Though
their particle model was a complete failure, they arrived to the first wormhole
spacetime model that is known as Einstein-Rosen bridge.
Almost twenty years passed until the subject was revived by J.A.Wheeler
[6] in 1955 when he published a work about “geons”. This is the first time that
a wormhole space diagram appears in the scientific literature. Two years later,
C.W. Misner and J.A.Wheeler [7] analyzed the geometry of manifolds with
non-trivial topology with the aim to explain completely all classical physics.
The word “wormhole” is employed for the first time in the context of General
Relativity.
In the seventies, H.G. Ellis introduced[10,11] a kind of wormhole solution,
called Ellis drainhole; Bronnikov[12] noticed that the solution was free from
event horizons and singularities, geodesically complete and able to be “crossed”
independent of direction1. During the sixties and seventies, there was great
progress in different aspects of General Relativity. However, not much work
was focused on the analysis of Lorentzian wormholes.
The pioneer work of Michael Morris and Kip Thorne [13] on traversable
wormholes, also called Morris-Thorne Wormholes (MTWH), caused a major
revival on the subject. In their famous paper published in 1988, they focused
on the necessary conditions in order to have a wormhole geometry that could
connect two flat asymptotically spacetime regions; these solutions must not
contain horizons or real singularities, and are connected by a “throat” that is
kept open due to presence of exotic matter (matter that violates the energy
conditions) that exerts gravitational repulsion2.
Much has been discovered about these astonishing solutions. Roman,
proposed a mechanism to “inflate” the microscopic wormholes discussed
by Wheeler[15]; Kim has found cosmological traversable wormholes[16], Teo
discovered the rotational version of MTWH[17] and A. Alias proposed a
slowly rotational version of Teo’s rotating metric[18]. Furthermore, Kim also
constructed a form of charged MTWH[19]. A scalar field supporting the
traversable wormhole was introduced by L.Butcher[20] and a few years ago
Lobo, Quinet and Oliveira discovered the deSitter MTWH[21]. Traversable
wormholes have also been studied in alternative theories of gravitation
such as f(R) and f(R, T ) gravity[22–34] and in analogue gravity[38]. There
are works on traversable wormholes in cosmology[36,37], astrophysics [43],
thermodynamics[39,40,42] and their shadows were also computed [35].
Though several wormhole solutions have been extensively analyzed during
the years, the first charged transversable wormhole geometry found more than
twenty years ago[19] has barely been investigated. One interesting feature of
1There are two different solutions of the Ellis drainhole, with matter [10] and no matter flow
[11], being the later the simplest. Notice that both Bronnikov and Ellis arrived independently to
these solutions, so these are referred as “Ellis-Bronnikov Wormholes”.
2In 1989, G. Cl´ement [14] demonstrated that the Ellis drainhole is type of a traversable
wormhole.