A possible cause of the late-time cosmic acceleration is an exotic fluid with an equation of state lying within the phantom regime, i.e., $w=p/\rho <-1$. This violates the null energy condition, which is a fundamental ingredient in wormhole physics. Thus, cosmic phantom energy may, in principle, provide a natural fluid to support wormholes. In this work, we find new asymptotically flat wormhole solutions supported by the phantom energy equation of state, consequently extending previous solutions. Thus, there is no need to surgically paste the interior wormhole geometry to an exterior vacuum spacetime. In the first example, we carefully construct a specific shape function, where the energy density and pressures vanish at large distances as $\sim 1/r^n$, with $n>0$. We also consider the “volume integral quantifier,” which provides useful information regarding the total amount of energy-condition-violating matter, and show that, in principle, it is possible to construct asymptotically flat wormhole solutions with an arbitrary small amount of energy-condition-violating matter. In the second example, we analyze two equations of state, i.e., $p_r=p_r(\rho )$ and $p_t=p_t(\rho )$, where we consider a specific integrability condition in order to obtain exact asymptotically flat wormhole solutions. In the final example, we postulate a smooth energy density profile, possessing a maximum at the throat and vanishing at spatial infinity.

• Received 23 December 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.87.084030