English

On the boundary cost of source-consistent warp shells

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-05-26 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory Computational Physics

Abstract

We study classical energy-condition admissibility for subluminal, positive-energy warp shells. For the constructions examined here, the energy-condition failures are localized at the smooth source--vacuum transition rather than in the bulk interior. We introduce two \emph{source-first} shell ans"atze whose metric potentials are obtained from the Einstein constraints for a prescribed matter model: a shift-free S-shell and a T-shell whose shift is derived from the momentum constraint. We assess them with a five-criterion standard comprising regularity, constraint satisfaction, an explicit matter model, frame-independent energy-condition margins, and global diagnostics; the standard responds to the source-consistency critique of Barzegar, Buchert, and Vigneron. Applied to eight constructions spanning the canonical warp-drive classes, none passes the full standard. An independent frame-independent verification of the Fuchs constant-velocity shell confirms interior energy-condition compliance (0 of 13 interior probes violate) but reveals Hawking--Ellis Type~IV violations in the smoothing tail beyond the nominal shell. A frame-independent scan over shell compactness and thickness (600 configurations) yields no admissible configuration in either source-first class. The same boundary deficit appears in the shift-free S-shell and persists in the static v0=0v_0=0 limit, which ties it to the transition geometry rather than to the shift. Along a representative off-axis null ray the null-energy line integral is nevertheless positive for every source-prescribed shell; this is an exploratory diagnostic rather than a proof of the averaged null energy condition, but it shows that the pointwise boundary failures need not appear in that integral.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.25417,
  title  = {On the boundary cost of source-consistent warp shells},
  author = {An T. Le},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.25417},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:31:47.418Z