Two metal plates in a vacuum attract each other without any magnets or charges. This is the Casimir effect: the void is not empty; particles constantly pop in and out of existence, and there are fewer of them between the plates than outside. The pressure difference pushes the plates together.
The authors of the new study applied this idea to wormholes — hypothetical tunnels in spacetime. Normally, such tunnels collapse unless held open by something with negative energy. But in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory, higher-order corrections to gravity themselves provide the necessary support. The scientists found solutions where the wormhole throat remains open thanks to the Casimir energy, and the energy conditions are satisfied — meaning the matter behaves realistically, without fantastical violations.
They also traced the paths of light and massive particles through such a wormhole. The trajectories bend but remain predictable. The same quantum ripples that shift plates in the lab might, perhaps, connect distant regions of the cosmos.
as written by the authors arXiv:2607.22876
In this work, we study Casimir wormhole solutions and investigate satisfaction of energy conditions in the framework of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet (EGB) gravity. We firstly find traversable wormhole solutions supported by a general form for the Casimir energy density. Applying a specific redshift function, we choose suitable parameters that respect the energy conditions in the vicinity of the throat due to the presence of higher order curvature terms. Then, we check the energy conditions considering non-constant redshift function and for suitable choice of model parameters, we find that these conditions are satisfied at infinity as well as in the vicinity of the throat. The stability of the Casimir traversable wormhole solutions are investigated using the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equation. Finally, we study trajectory of null as well as timelike particles in the wormhole spacetime.
The Casimir effect was predicted by Hendrik Casimir in 1948 while he was working at the Philips Research Laboratories on the properties of colloidal solutions — not astrophysics at all.
In the movie Interstellar, a wormhole appears near Saturn, and its stability is explained by 'exotic matter'—the new work proposes a more natural mechanism.