Related papers: The quantum inequalities do not forbid spacetime s…
Quantum gravitational effects usually are assumed to be important on small scale (Planck scale), but actually these effects are also very significant on large (cosmological) scales. It is recognized that in curved spacetime, the existence…
In this talk I discuss pertinence of the wormholes to the problem of circumventing the light speed barrier and present a specific class of wormholes. The wormholes of this class are static and have arbitrarily wide throats, which makes them…
Spacetimes admitting appropriate spatial homothetic Killing vectors are called spatially homothetic spacetimes. Such spacetimes conform to the fact that gravity has no length-scale for matter inhomogeneities. The matter density for such…
Wormholes have been advanced as both a method for circumventing the limitations of the speed of light as well as a means for building a time machine (to travel to the past). Thus it is argued that General Relativity may allow both of these…
Enforcing the spacetime of supermassive cosmic strings to satisfy the symmetry of a gravitational topological defect, that is a spacetime kink, it is shown that the energy of these strings becomes quantized so that only defects whose…
Quantum inequalities are bounds on negative time-averages of the energy density of a quantum field. They can be used to rule out exotic spacetimes in general relativity. We study quantum inequalities for a scalar field with a background…
Our purpose here is to introduce the idea of viewing the spacetime as a macroscopic complex system which, consequently, cannot be directly quantized. It should be thought of as a collection of more fundamental "microscopical" entities…
Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts in spacetime that in General Relativity unavoidably violate all of the pointwise energy conditions. In this paper, we consider several wormhole spacetimes that, as opposed to the standard \emph{designer}…
We consider the nonlinear energy conditions and their quantum extensions. These new energy conditions behave much better than the usual pointwise energy conditions in the presence of semiclassical quantum effects. Analogous quantum…
I show how a minor modification of the Alcubierre geometry can dramatically improve the total energy requirements for a `warp bubble' that can be used to transport macroscopic objects. A spacetime is presented for which the total negative…
Most approaches to quantum gravity suggest that relativistic spacetime is not fundamental, but instead emerges from some non-spatiotemporal structure. This paper investigates the implications of this suggestion for the possibility of time…
Quantum inequality restrictions on the stress-energy tensor for negative energy are developed for three and four-dimensional static spacetimes. We derive a general inequality in terms of a sum of mode functions which constrains the…
We construct a particular class of quantum states for a massless, minimally coupled free scalar field which are of the form of a superposition of the vacuum and multi-mode two-particle states. These states can exhibit local negative energy…
A link between the possibility of extending a geodessically incomplete kinked spacetime to a spacetime which is geodesically complete and the energy conditions is discussed for the case of a cylindrically-symmetric spacetime kink. It is…
Traversable wormholes necessarily require violations of the averaged null energy condition; this being the definition of ``exotic matter''. However, the theorems which guarantee the energy condition violation are remarkably silent when it…
Noncommutative spacetimes are a proposed effective description of the low-energy regime of Quantum Gravity. Defining the microcausality relations of a scalar quantum field theory on the $\kappa$-Minkowski noncommutative spacetime allows us…
Suppose we assume that (a) information about a black hole is encoded in its Hawking radiation and (b) causality is not violated to leading order in gently curved spacetime. Then we argue that spacetime cannot just be described as a manifold…
We discuss causality properties of extra-dimensional theories allowing for effectively superluminal bulk shortcuts. Such shortcuts for sterile neutrinos have been discussed as a solution to the puzzling LSND and MiniBooNE neutrino…
While it is generally agreed that the nature of spacetime must be drastically different at the Planck scale, it has been a common practice to assume that spacetime is endowed with a full pseudo-Riemannian geometry regardless of the physical…
We show that Lorentzian (traversable) wormholes and time machines with semi-classical spacetimes are unstable due to their violation of the null energy condition (NEC). Semi-classicality of the energy-momentum tensor in a given quantum…