Exotic Fluids Matching the Stress-Energy Tensor of Alcubierre Warp Drive Spacetimes

Abstract: To gain more insights about what could be the source of the Alcubierre warp drive, a technique designed to find an orthogonal basis from the metric expression is used. It is deduced that exotic fluids can produce the same stress-energy tensor as the Alcubierre warp drive. For different configurations of warp acceleration and velocity, constraints on density, pressure, total positive mass, total negative mass, absolute value of the equation of state as well as null-energy condition violation are provided. The Alcubierre warp drive Einstein tensor expression and the optimization of fluid properties result in power laws between various physical quantities and warp velocity. The investigated setups exhibit non-exotic equation of states for warp velocities smaller than 0.004c and seem able to sustain warp velocities up to 2200c with exotic equations of state.