Cylindrical wormholes

It is shown that the existence of static, cylindrically symmetric wormholes does not require violation of the weak or null energy conditions near the throat, and cylindrically symmetric wormhole geometries can appear with less exotic sources than wormholes whose throats have a spherical topology. Examples of exact wormhole solutions are given with scalar, spinor and electromagnetic fields as sources, and these fields are not necessarily phantom. In particular, there are wormhole solutions for a massless, minimally coupled scalar field in the presence of a negative cosmological constant, and for an azimuthal Maxwell electromagnetic field. All these solutions are not asymptotically flat. A no-go theorem is proved, according to which a flat (or string) asymptotic behavior on both sides of a cylindrical wormhole throat is impossible if the energy density of matter is everywhere nonnegative. © 2009 The American Physical Society.