Palatini wormholes and energy conditions from the prism of general relativity

Abstract

Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts in spacetime that in general relativity unavoidably violate all of the pointwise energy conditions. In this paper, we consider several wormhole spacetimes that, as opposed to the standard designer procedure frequently employed in the literature, arise directly from gravitational actions including additional terms resulting from contractions of the Ricci tensor with the metric, and which are formulated assuming independence between metric and connection (Palatini approach). We reinterpret such wormhole solutions under the prism of General Relativity and study the matter sources that thread them. We discuss the size of violation of the energy conditions in different cases and how this is related to the same spacetimes when viewed from the modified gravity side.