Constraints on Wormhole Formation from Phantom Dark Energy in DESI
Moiseev I.A., Sazhina O.S.

Received: September 9, 2025

DOI: 25120078

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For dark energy (DE) being a dynamical field, an equation-of-state parameter w < -1 leads to the phantom DE state, allowing wormhole (WH) throats to be stabilized effectively. We investigated the possibility of the existence of traversable WHs, whose stability is fully ensured by phantom DE, the dominance of which was recently indicated by the DESI project. Within the framework of the simple Morris-Thorne model, we derived a phenomenological relation connecting the throat radius b with the energy density of the phantom dynamical field ρ _ph(z). This establishes a direct connection between cosmological parameters and the properties of traversable WHs, showing that phantom DE could, in principle, serve as the exotic matter required to sustain WHs with throat sizes spanning from the gravitational radii of stellar-mass BHs and SMBHs up to cosmological scales. We investigated possible WH formation channels and showed extreme suppression of two mechanisms (Euclidean instanton tunneling and thermal fluctuation nucleation). Using gravitational lensing SQLS constraints on Ellis-Bronnikov WHs, we quantified the fraction of phantom energy that can be trapped in such WHs, , indicating that only a small fraction of the phantom DE can be trapped in WH throats. Overall, our results show both the theoretical consistency and the observational limitations of phantom-supported WHs.