Instability of wormholes supported by a ghost scalar field. II. Nonlinear evolution

Understand

We analyze the nonlinear evolution of spherically symmetric wormhole solutions coupled to a massless ghost scalar field using numerical methods.

• In a previous article we have shown that static wormholes with these properties are unstable with respect to linear perturbations.
• Here we show that depending on the initial perturbation the wormholes either expand or decay to a Schwarzschild black hole.
• We estimate the time scale of the expanding solutions and the ones collapsing to a black hole and show that they are consistent in the regime of small perturbations with those predicted from perturbation theory.