On the Lichnerowicz operator in traversable wormhole spacetimes

The evaluation of Casimir energies in curved background spacetimes is an essential ingredient to study the stability of traversable wormholes. In practice one has to calculate the contribution of the transverse-traceless component of the metric perturbation on a curved spacetime background. This implies the study of an eigenvalue equation involving a modified form of the Lichnerowicz operator. For arbitrary background spacetimes, however, such an operator does not display transverse-traceless properties, a fact that impedes the determination of the eigenvalues. Against this background, we show that the problem can be circumvented. Casimir energies can be calculated by gauging the original form of the modified Lichnerowicz operator into a transverse-traceless one.