Warp drive basics

TL;DR

This paper explores the theoretical foundations and properties of warp drive spacetimes, including energy violations, horizons, and potential for time travel, highlighting their significance in understanding general relativity's limits.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of warp drive geometries, their violations of energy conditions, and introduces Krasnikov's metric as a potential solution to control issues.

Findings

Warp drive spacetimes violate classical energy conditions.

Superluminal travel involves horizons and closed timelike curves.

Krasnikov's metric allows short round-trip times without creating warp bubbles.

Abstract

"Warp drive" spacetimes and wormhole geometries are useful as "gedanken-experiments" that force us to confront the foundations of general relativity, and among other issues, to precisely formulate the notion of "superluminal" travel and communication. Here we will consider the basic definition and properties of warp drive spacetimes. In particular, we will discuss the violation of the energy conditions associated with these spacetimes, as well as some other interesting properties such as the appearance of horizons for the superluminal case, and the possibility of using a warp drive to create closed timelike curves. Furthermore, due to the horizon problem, an observer in a spaceship cannot create nor control on demand a warp bubble. To contour this difficulty, we discuss a metric introduced by Krasnikov, which also possesses the interesting property in that the time for a round trip, as measured by clocks at the starting point, can be made arbitrarily short.