You can poke a pencil through a folded sheet of paper, and the path between two points becomes shorter. That's roughly how the idea of a wormhole works: a tunnel in space connecting distant regions. But gravity tends to collapse such a tunnel unless something with negative pressure holds it open, like an inflated balloon keeps its walls from caving in.
The authors of the study started with the Ellis–Bronnikov geometry, the simplest form of a wormhole, which is supported by a phantom field (dark energy in miniature). They showed that if you add electromagnetic fields and fields from an extra dimension, you get a whole zoo of solutions. The most interesting part: these solutions are not pulled out of thin air: they follow naturally from a five-dimensional theory where the extra dimension is curled into a tiny ring.
The scientists found that you can switch on electric and magnetic charges as well as the Kaluza–Klein vector field and still get a traversable wormhole without singularities. The math remains transparent: the equations reduce to algebraic relations rather than cumbersome simulations. That's rare — usually such constructions require complex numerical calculations.
Returning to the sheet of paper: extra dimensions, like invisible folds, may harbor shortcuts through space. And this work shows that such shortcuts do not contradict known physics: you just need to fold things properly.
The term "wormhole" was coined by physicist John Wheeler in 1957; before that, they were called "Einstein–Rosen bridges."
In the movie Interstellar, a wormhole near Saturn allows the heroes to reach another galaxy, and its traversability is explained precisely by exotic matter, similar to the phantom field in this paper.