Electric fields and quantum wormholes

ABSTRACT

Electric fields can thread a classical Einstein-Rosen bridge. Maldacena and Susskind have recently suggested that in a theory of dynamical gravity the entanglement of ordinary perturbative quanta should be viewed as creating a quantum version of an Einstein-Rosen bridge between the particles, or a “quantum wormhole.” We demonstrate within low-energy effective field theory that there is a precise sense in which electric fields can also thread such quantum wormholes. We define a nonperturbative “wormhole susceptibility” that measures the ease of passing an electric field through any sort of wormhole. The susceptibility of a quantum wormhole is suppressed by powers of the U1 gauge coupling relative to that for a classical wormhole but can be made numerically equal with a sufficiently large amount of entangled matter.