Instability of wormholes supported by a ghost scalar field: II. Nonlinear evolution

We analyze the nonlinear evolution of spherically symmetric wormhole solutions coupled to a massless ghost scalar field using numerical methods. In a previous article, we have shown that static wormholes with these properties are unstable with respect to linear perturbations. Here, we show that depending on the initial perturbation the wormholes either expand or decay to a Schwarzschild black hole. We estimate the time scale of the expanding solutions and those collapsing to a black hole, and show that they are consistent in the regime of small perturbations with those predicted from perturbation theory. In the collapsing case, we also present a systematic study of the final black hole horizon and discuss the possibility for a luminous signal to travel from one universe to the other and back before the black hole forms. In the expanding case, the wormholes seem to undergo an exponential expansion, at least during the run time of our simulations.