Wormhole Nucleation via Topological Surgery in Lorentzian Geometry

We construct a model for the nucleation of a wormhole within a Lorentzian spacetime by employing techniques from topological surgery and Morse theory. In our framework, a 0-surgery process describes the neighborhood of the nucleation point inside a compact region of spacetime, yielding a singular Lorentzian cobordism that connects two spacelike regions with different topologies. To avoid the singularity at the critical point of the Morse function, we employ the Misner trick of taking a connected sum with a closed 4-manifold – namely ${\mathbb{C}\mathbb{P}}^2$ – to obtain an everywhere nondegenerate Lorentzian metric. This connected sum replaces the naked singularity with a region containing closed timelike curves. The obtained spacetime is nonsingular, but violates all the standard energy conditions. Our construction, thus, shows that a wormhole can be “created” without singularities in classical general relativity.