On the warp drive space-time

In a seminal paper, Alcubierre showed that Einstein's theory of general relativity appears to allow a super-luminal motion. In the present study, we use a recent eternal-warp-drive solution found by Alcubierre to study the effect of Hawking radiation upon an observer located within the warp drive in the framework of the quantum tunneling method. We find the same expression for the Hawking temperatures associated with the tunneling of both massive vector and scalar particles, ...

It can be shown that negative energy requirements within the Alcubierre spacetime can be greatly reduced when one introduces a lapse function into the Einstein tensor. Thereby reducing the negative energy requirements of the warp drive spacetime arbitrarily as a function of A(ct,r_s). With this function new quantum inequality restrictions are investigated in a general form. Finally a pseudo method for controlling a warp bubble at a velocity greater than that of light is prese...

In this paper, a class of the warp drive (WD) type metrics is proposed in the form of spherical and plane waves or shells. In particular, these metrics can describe the passage of spherical WD through the horizon of a black hole from the inside out. In this metrics, non-singular evolution of physical fields is possible, which is demonstrated by examples of scalar, vector and fermion fields. The passage of a warp-wave through the fields is accompanied by soliton-like configura...

"Warp drive" spacetimes are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other things, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" communication. We verify the non-perturbative violation of the classical energy conditions of the Alcubierre and Natario warp drive spacetimes and apply linearized gravity to the weak-field warp drive, testing the energy conditions to first and second order of the non-relativis...

''Warp drive'' spacetimes are useful as ''gedanken-experiments'' and as a theoretician's probe of the foundations of general relativity. Applying linearized gravity to the weak-field warp drive, i.e., for non-relativistic warp-bubble velocities, we find that the occurrence of energy condition violations in this class of spacetimes is generic to the form of the geometry under consideration and is not simply a side-effect of the ''superluminal'' properties. Using the linearized...

Following the work of H. Ellis, we study warp drives in the gravitational field of a Schwarzschild black hole. We find that as long as the warp drive crosses the black hole horizon at a subluminal speed, the horizon would be effectively absent inside the warp bubble. Moreover, we discover that the black hole's gravitational field can alleviate the violations of the weak energy condition (WEC) and the null energy condition (NEC) and therefore decrease the amount of negative en...

The field of warp research has been dominated by analytical methods to investigate potential solutions. However, these approaches often favor simple metric forms that facilitate analysis but ultimately limit the range of exploration of novel solutions. So far the proposed solutions have been unphysical, requiring energy condition violations and large energy requirements. To overcome the analytical limitations in warp research, we introduce Warp Factory: a numerical toolkit de...

It will be shown that while horizons do not exist for warp drive spacetimes traveling at subluminal velocities horizons begin to develop when a warp drive spacetime reaches luminal velocities. However it will be shown that the control region of a warp drive ship lie within the portion of the warped region that is still causally connected to the ship even at superluminal velocities, therefore allowing a ship to slow to subluminal velocities. Further it is shown that the warped...

The problems of hazardous radiation and collisions with matter on a warp driven ship pose considerable obstacles to this possibility for interstellar travel. A solution to these problems lies in the Broeck metric. It is demonstrated that both threats to the ship will be greatly reduced. It is also shown that the horizon problem no longer exists.

The continuation of Misner space into the Euclidean region is seen to imply the topological restriction that the period of the closed spatial direction becomes time-dependent. This restriction results in a modified Lorentzian Misner space in which the renormalized stress-energy tensor for quantized complex massless scalar fields becomes regular everywhere, even on the chronology horizon. A quantum-mechanically stable time machine with just the sub-microscopic size may then be...