Wormholes, Dark Energy, and the Null Energy Condition – Roman Buniy

Date: Tue. October 4th, 2005, 11:30 am-12:30 pm
Location: Rockefeller 221

We show that violation of the null energy condition implies instability in a broad class of models, including classical gauge theories with scalar and fermionic matter as well as any perfect fluid. When applied to the dark energy, our results imply that w = p / rho is unlikely to be less than -1. As another application, Lorentzian (traversable) wormholes and time machines with semi-classical spacetimes are unstable to small perturbations.