Light rings, timelike circular orbits and curvature of traversable wormholes (2504.10732v2)

Abstract: We study the existence of light rings (LR's) and timelike circular orbits (TCO's) in spherically symmetric, asymptotically flat wormhole geometries. We use a purely geometric approach based in the intrinsic curvatures of a $2$-dimensional Riemannian metric obtained by projecting the spacetime metric over surfaces of constant energy. Using the asymptotic and near throat limits of geodesic curvature we determine the existence of LR's and TCO's in wormhole geometries, then analyzing the sign of the Gaussian curvature we are able to determine their stability. We deduce the conditions for the existence of photon and massive particle surfaces. We apply the results to the Morris-Thorne family of wormholes, Damour-Solodukhin wormholes and Ellis-Bronnikov wormholes. We show that for the wormholes considered there is always an odd number of light rings, one of them at the throat. In the case of Morris-Thorne wormhole our method leads to a procedure for building a wormhole with more than one LR. We study how the procedure can be extended to other wormhole spacetimes.