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Fundamental limitations on ‘warp drive’ spacetimes
Open accessAbstract
'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. After carefully formulating the Alcubierre and Natário warp drive spacetimes, and verifying their non-perturbative violation of the classical energy conditions, we consider a more modest question and apply linearized gravity to the weak-field warp drive, testing the energy conditions to first and second orders of the warp-bubble velocity, v . Since we take the warp-bubble velocity to be non-relativistic, v ≪ c , we are not primarily interested in the 'superluminal' features of the warp drive. Instead we focus on a secondary feature of the warp drive that has not previously been remarked upon—the warp drive (if it could be built) would be an example of a 'reaction-less drive'. For both the Alcubierre and Natário warp drives we find that the occurrence of significant energy condition violations is not just a high-speed effect, but that the violations persist even at arbitrarily low speeds. A particularly interesting feature of this construction is that it is now meaningful to think of placing a finite mass spaceship at the centre of the warp bubble, and then see how the energy in the warp field compares with the mass–energy of the spaceship. There is no hope of doing this in Alcubierre's original version of the warp field, since by definition the point at the centre of the warp bubble moves on a geodesic and is 'massless'. That is, in Alcubierre's original formalism and in the Natário formalism the spaceship is always treated as a test particle, while in the linearized theory we can treat the spaceship as a finite mass object. For both the Alcubierre and Natário warp drives we find that even at low speeds the net (negative) energy stored in the warp fields must be a significant fraction of the mass of the spaceship.
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Citations
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Metadata
- Authors
- Lobo, F. S. N., & Visser, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Lisbon (PT)
- Victoria University of Wellington (NZ)
- Venue
- Classical and Quantum Gravity
- Publisher
- IOP Publishing
- Published
- 2004-11-26
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 24
- Pages
- 5871-5892
- ISSN
- 0264-9381 (ISSN-L)
- 1361-6382
- OpenAlex
- W2077412049
- Cited by
- 117
- References
- 46
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 6
- FWCI
- 2.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Classical and Quantum Gravity (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- Royal Society Te Apārangi
- Marsden Fund
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Relativity and Gravitational Theory
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Nuclear and High Energy Physics › Black Holes and Theoretical Physics
- Keywords
- warp drive, Alcubierre metric, energy conditions, superluminal communication, linearized gravity, weak-field limit, warp bubble, negative energy
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