Work

On Restrictions of Current Warp Drive Spacetimes and Immediate Possibilities of Improvement

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Looking at current proposals of so-called ‘warp drive spacetimes’, they appear to employ General Relativity only at an elementary level. A number of strong restrictions are imposed such as flow-orthogonality of the spacetime foliation, vanishing spatial Ricci tensor, and dimensionally reduced and coordinate-dependent velocity fields, to mention the main restrictions. We here provide a brief summary of our proposal of a general and covariant description of spatial motions within General Relativity, then discuss the restrictions that are employed in the majority of the current literature. That current warp drive models are discussed to be unphysical may not be surprising; they lack important ingredients such as covariantly non-vanishing spatial velocity, acceleration, vorticity together with curved space, and a warp mechanism.

Source: Universe

DOI: 10.3390/universe11090293

Authors: Hamed Barzegar, Thomas Buchert

Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon

Language: English

Topic: Cosmology and Gravitation Theories

Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,930

Funders: European Commission, European Research Council