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The Alcubierre Warp Drive: On the Matter of Matter

Brendan McMonigal, Geraint F. Lewis, Philip O'Byrne

2012 · arXiv

Physics
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From the abstract

The Alcubierre warp drive allows a spaceship to travel at an arbitrarily large global velocity by deforming the spacetime in a bubble around the spaceship. Little is known about the interactions between massive particles and the Alcubierre warp drive, or the effects of an accelerating or decelerating warp bubble. We examine geodesics representative of the paths of null and massive particles with a range of initial velocities from -c to c interacting with an Alcubierre warp bubble travelling at a range of globally subluminal and superluminal velocities on both constant and variable velocity paths. The key results for null particles match what would be expected of massive test particles as they approach +/- c. The increase in energy for massive and null particles is calculated in terms of v_s, the global ship velocity, and v_p, the initial velocity of the particle with respect to the rest frame of the origin/destination of the ship. Particles with positive v_p obtain extremely high energy and velocity and become "time locked" for the duration of their time in the bubble, experiencing very little proper time between entering and eventually leaving the bubble. When interacting with an accelerating bubble, any particles within the bubble at the time receive a velocity boost that increases or decreases the magnitude of their velocity if the particle is moving towards the front or rear of the bubble respectively. If the bubble is decelerating, the opposite effect is observed. Thus Eulerian matter is unaffected by bubble accelerations/decelerations. The magnitude of the velocity boosts scales with the magnitude of the bubble acceleration/deceleration.

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4 selected excerpts · 4 total mentions

yk
Recommendation · rule
Sorry for the botched formatting (HN is for some reason not showing me a edit link :/ ) A quite interesting paper on the topic is McMonigal & al. [1], it is a bit technical but they discuss the Alcubierre warp drive quite nicely. To elaborate on the second paragraph about special relativity, one way to define Lorentz transformations is, that they are the transformations which preserve the causal structure of Minkowsky space. On the other hand, the speed limit is a direct consequence of the Lorentz transformations. So the causal structure and the speed limit are directly related. To look again at the argument that a velocity larger than the speed of light implies causality…
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violation: The moment you argue that a speed faster than the speed of light is possible, you implicitly change the meaning of causality. Then you use the Lorentz transformations to conclude that in on frame of reference event A precedes B and that event B precedes A in another. So you first deny the special status of the Lorentz transformation, just to go on and use Lorentz transformations. And my take on this is a strong maybe, the moment you start talking about local Lorentz invariance violation, anything goes. Perhaps there is causality violation, perhaps not, but this depends on your specific meaning of 'causality' and 'faster than light' and not very much on special relativity. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708
Original comment Faster Than the Speed of Light?
serverholic
Neutral mention · rule
What I said is about the limit of my knowledge unfortunately. However here’s the paper from the University of Sidney that goes into much greater detail. pdf warning https://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.5708v1.pdf From the paper: > These results suggest that any ship using an Alcu- bierre warp drive carrying people would need shielding to protect them from potential dangerously blueshifted particles during the journey, and any people at the des- tination would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for P+ region particles.
Original comment Are warp drives science now?
thangalin
Neutral mention · rule
I was assuming conventional propulsion at 95% c. An Alcubierre warp field would be ideal, assuming the problems can be overcome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Difficulties http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4960 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708 I'd enjoy seeing your calculation of the number of years that would have passed on Earth for a round-trip of 100 light-years out.
Original comment Tens of billions of potentially habitable, Earth-size planets in our galaxy
gliese1337
Neutral mention · rule
Here is a paper on the results of interactions with external matter en-route: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708 With a couple of popularizations: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/04/killer_warp_drive/ http://www.universetoday.com/93882/warp-drives-may-come-with... (Essentially, particles encountered en-route pile up near the boundary and are released in a large burst when you turn the thing off, which is potentially very bad for the local environment, of which you are a part.) And here's a paper on the horizon-like properties of the warp bubble boundary: http://staff.science.nus.edu.sg/~scilooe/srp_2003/sci_paper/...
Original comment Highly relativistic spaceflight would be fatal for passengers and instruments

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