Quantum effects in the Alcubierre warp drive spacetime
William A. Hiscock
Abstract
The expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of a free conformally invariant scalar field is computed in a two-dimensional reduction of the Alcubierre ``warp drive'' spacetime. The stress-energy is found to diverge if the apparent velocity of the spaceship exceeds the speed of light. If such behavior occurs in four dimensions, then it appears implausible that ``warp drive'' behavior in a spacetime could be engineered, even by an arbitrarily advanced civilization.
Create a lesson
Related papers
Non-Commutativity in Geodesic Congruences
Aarav Shah, Louis H. Kauffman
Scalar wave dark matter imprints on binary black hole mergers: dependence on field mass and density
Yu-Peng Zhang, Shao-Wen Wei, Yu-Xiao Liu
Quantum Energy Inequalities with a twist: rotating frames along stationary worldlines
Christopher J. Fewster, Daniel Lomax Ford
Analytic Electromagnetic Effective Source for Geodesic Orbit in Schwarzschild Spacetime
Xuchen Lu, Yungui Gong, Bokai Zhang et al.
Stability conditions for light rings in circular stationary axisymmetric spacetimes
Jake O. Shipley
Post-Newtonian secular dynamics of hierarchical triples II. Canonical derivation of the 1PN\,×\,quadrupole cross terms and of the quadrupole-squared term
Hideyoshi Arakida