String Theory seminar - Panos Betzios Seminar

In this talk I will first give a brief introduction to instantons and merons. Then I will describe a Euclidean meron wormhole solution of Einstein - Yang-Mills. Its study is motivated by the antipodal mapping of 't Hooft in the context of black hole physics, that provides a possible understanding of the role of the two exteriors of the maximal Kruskal extension. Our wormhole background provides an easier context where this mapping can be further analyzed. I will then describe some preliminary efforts to compute the fluctuation spectrum of fields up to spin-2 in order to test the stability of the solution. I will conclude with a study of Green's functions of scalar fields and a possible analytic continuation to Lorentzian signature.