Quantum effects in the Alcubierre warp drive spacetime

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.

9 pages, ReVTeX

References in corpus (2)

• The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity
• The unphysical nature of "Warp Drive"

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