Electromagnetic, gravitational wave, and static gravitational transmission through throat spacetimes: A constraint-wave asymmetry
Phys. Rev. D 114, 044030 – Published 11 August, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/9xyc-f581
Abstract
We computethe transmission properties of electromagnetic (EM), gravitational wave, and static gravitational perturbations through geometric throats in spherically symmetric spacetimes. On the ultrastatic Ellis-Bronnikov background, decomposition of the four-dimensional Maxwell equations into vector spherical harmonics yields an effective Schrödinger problem with centrifugal barrier peaked at the throat. For the lowest physical EM mode (), frequencies below the barrier-top frequency are strongly suppressed by sub-barrier tunneling. Gravitational wave perturbations () see a qualitatively similar barrier and are likewise strongly suppressed below their respective barrier-top frequencies. By contrast, the static gravitational monopole (), governed by the linearized Einstein equations on the same background, satisfies the source-free conservation law with no potential barrier, yielding the exact solution . We extend these results to a one-parameter family of throat geometries with varying profile shapes, and to a reflected-Schwarzschild (Damour-Solodukhin-type) wormhole, demonstrating that the qualitative asymmetry—strong sub-barrier suppression for all propagating radiation () versus polynomial attenuation for the static monopole ()—is universal for static, spherically symmetric throats. Numerov integration, WKB estimates, and exact analytical solutions are compared throughout. The results establish a structural constraint-wave asymmetry arising from the multipole decomposition of the field equations, independent of the matter content sourcing the geometry, on a fixed background.