MG12 - Talk detail
 

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Abstract

Superlminal Warp Drives are Semiclassically Unstable

Warp drives are very interesting configurations of General Relativity, since they provide a way to travel at superluminal speeds. Even if one succeeded in building them, it would still be necessary to check whether they would survive to the switching on of quantum effects. Semiclassical corrections to such geometries have been analyzed only for eternal warp-drive bubbles traveling at fixed superluminal speeds. I shall present the more realistic case in which a superluminal warp drive is created out of an initially flat spacetime. In this case, thermal radiation at very high temperature fills the whole bubble. More dramatically, the renormalized stress-energy tensor exponentially grows in time close to the bubble front wall, supporting the conclusion that these geometries are unstable against semiclassical back-reaction.

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