In collaboration with Professor Panagiota Kanti from the University of Ioannina (Greece), the Field Theory working group at the University of Oldenburg led by Professor Jutta Kunz and Privatdozent Burkhard Kleihaus has succeeded in showing that new types of wormholes exist in theories of gravity motivated by string theory, which have quite astonishing properties.

For decades, wormholes have been regarded in science fiction as tunnels between different universes that could be used as a "shortcut" for interstellar travel. Although the existence of wormholes is also possible according to Einstein's theory of gravity, they are regarded as purely hypothetical in this theory, as they are considered unstable and can only exist in the presence of "exotic" matter - a hypothetical form of matter. However, if Einstein's theory of gravity is modified by corrections to string theory, wormholes can exist with significantly different properties, as the research group has now shown.

The newly discovered wormholes do not require any "exotic" matter to exist, and they also appear to be stable within a certain parameter range. In principle, these wormholes can also be arbitrarily large, but not arbitrarily small. These results were recently published in the renowned journals "Physical Review Letters" and "The Physical Review D" and were picked up by the science magazine "New Scientist" in a cover story.

The Field Theory working group has been researching Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and its solutions for years. However, the research also goes beyond Einstein's theory, as newer theories such as string theory give hope for a unification of quantum theory and gravity. And although the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet-Dilaton theory under investigation is only regarded as a "toy model", it nevertheless models important properties of a "realistic" theory of gravity with string corrections. Future research by the working group will investigate the existence of wormholes in such "realistic" theories in more detail and also analyse their possible astrophysical consequences.