Probing global aspects of a geometry by the self-force on a charge; cylindical thin-shell wormholes

摘要

We obtain the self-interaction for a point charge in the space-time of acylindrical thin-shell wormhole connecting two identical locally flatgeometries with a constant deficit angle. Although this wormhole geometry islocally indistinguishable from a cosmic string background, the correspondingself-forces are different even at the qualitative level. In fact in the cosmicstring geometry the force is always repulsive while for the wormhole backgroundwe find that the force may point outwards or towards the wormhole throatdepending on the parameters of the configuration. These results suggest thatthe study of the electromagnetic fields of charged particles is a useful toolfor testing the global properties of a given background.