Abstract: We find that if general relativity is modified at the Planck scale by a Ricci-squared term, electrically charged black holes may be nonsingular. These objects concentrate their mass in a microscopic sphere of radius r(core) approximate to N(q)(1/2)l(P)/3, where l(P) is the Planck length and N-q is the number of electric charges. The singularity is avoided if the mass of the object satisfies the condition M-0(2) approximate to m(P)(2)alpha N-3/2(em)q(3)/2, where m(P) is the Planck mass and alpha(em) is the fine-structure constant. For astrophysical black holes this amount of charge is so small that their external horizon almost coincides with their Schwarzschild radius. We work within a first-order (Palatini) approach.

Abstract: It has recently been suggested that Einstein-Rosen (ER) bridges can be interpreted as maximally entangled states of two black holes that form a complex Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair. This relationship has been dubbed as the correlation. In this work, we consider the latter conjecture in the context of quadratic Palatini theory. An important result, which stems from the underlying assumptions as regards the geometry on which the theory is constructed, is the fact that all the charged solutions of the quadratic Palatini theory possess a wormhole structure. Our results show that spacetime may have a foam-like microstructure with wormholes generated by fluctuations of the quantum vacuum. This involves the spontaneous creation/annihilation of entangled particle-antiparticle pairs, existing in a maximally entangled state connected by a non-traversable wormhole. Since the particles are produced from the vacuum and therefore exist in a singlet state, they are necessarily entangled with one another. This gives further support to the claim.

Abstract: Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts in space-time that in general relativity unavoidably violate all of the pointwise energy conditions. In this paper, we consider several wormhole spacetimes that, as opposed to the standard designer procedure frequently employed in the literature, arise directly from gravitational actions including additional terms resulting from contractions of the Ricci tensor with the metric, and which are formulated assuming independence between metric and connection (Palatini approach). We reinterpret such wormhole solutions under the prism of General Relativity and study the matter sources that thread them. We discuss the size of violation of the energy conditions in different cases and how this is related to the same spacetimes when viewed from the modified gravity side.