A Regular Center Instead of a Black Bounce

Abstract: The widely discussed “black-bounce” mechanism of removing a singularity at in a spherically symmetric space-time, proposed by Simpson and Visser, consists in removing the point and its close neighborhood, resulting in emergence of a regular minimum of the spherical radius that can be a wormhole throat or a regular bounce. Instead, it has been recently proposed to make a regular center by properly modifying the metric, still preserving its form in regions far from. Different algorithms of such modifications have been formulated for a few classes of singularities. The previous paper considered space-times whose Ricci tensor satisfies the condition, and regular modifications were obtained for the Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordström metrics, and two examples of solutions with magnetic fields obeying nonlinear electrodynamics (NED). The present paper considers regular modifications of more general space-times, and as examples, modifications with a regular center have been obtained for the Fisher (also known as JNW) solution with a naked singularity and a family of dilatonic black holes. Possible field sources of the new regular metrics are considered in the framework of general relativity (GR), using the fact that any static, spherically symmetric metric can be presented as a solution with a combined source involving NED and a scalar field with some self-interaction potential. This scalar field is, in general, not required to be of phantom nature (unlike the sources for black bounces), but in the examples discussed here, the possible scalar sources are phantom in a close neighborhood of and are canonical outside it. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.