Brane surgery:: energy conditions, traversable wormholes, and voids

Branes are ubiquitous elements of any low-energy limit of string theory. We point out that negative tension branes violate all the standard energy conditions of the higher-dimensional spacetime they are embedded in; this opens the door to very peculiar solutions of the higher-dimensional Einstein equations. Building upon the (3 + 1)-dimensional implementation of fundamental string theory, we illustrate the possibilities by considering a toy model consisting of a (2 + 1)-dimensional brane propagating through our observable (3 + 1)-dimensional universe. Developing a notion of "brane surgery", based on the Israel-Lanczos-Sen "thin shell" formalism of general relativity, we analyze the dynamics and find traversable wormholes, closed baby universes, voids (holes in the spacetime manifold), and an evasion (not a violation) of both the singularity theorems and the positive mass theorem. These features appear generic to any brane model that permits negative tension branes: This includes the Randall-Sundrum models and their variants. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.