The propagation of particles and fields in wormhole geometries

Abstract. We discuss several properties of static, spherically symmetric wormholes with particular emphasis on the behavior of causal geodesics and the propagation of linear fields. We show there always exist null geodesics which are trapped in a region close to the throat. Depending upon the detailed structure of the wormhole geometry, these trapped geodesics can be stable, unlike the case of the Schwarzschild black hole. We also show that test scalar fields propagating on such wormholes are stable. However, when a mixture of ghost and Klein-Gordon scalar fields is used as a source of the Einstein equations we prove that the resulting static, spherically symmetric wormhole configurations are linearly unstable