Warp drive basics Miguel Alcubierre ID ∗ Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares, Universidad Nacional Aut´onoma de M´exico, Circuito Exterior C.U., A.P. 70-543, M´exico D.F. 04510, M´exico Francisco S. N. Lobo ID † Instituto de Astrof´ısica e Ciˆencias do Espa¸co, Faculdade de Ciˆencias da Universidade de Lisboa, Edif´ıcio C8, Campo Grande, P-1749-016, Lisbon, Portugal A (Dated: LTEX-ed March 11, 2021) “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. arXiv:2103.05610v1 [gr-qc] 9 Mar 2021 ∗
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[email protected] 2 CONTENTS I. Introduction 2 II. Warp drive spacetime 3 A. Alcubierre warp drive 4 B. Superluminal travel in the warp drive 5 C.