Related papers: Warp drives, wavefronts and superluminality
In recent years, control of group velocity of light has attracted enormous interest. One of the main challenges is to realize an absorption-free fast or slow light propagation. Here, we study dispersion and absorption properties of a weak…
Superfocusing confines light within subwavelength structures, breaking the diffraction limit. Structures with spatial singularities, such as metallic cones, are crucial to enable nanoscale focusing, leading to significant advancements in…
Recent solutions to the Einstein Field Equations involving negative energy densities, i.e., matter violating the weak-energy-condition, have been obtained, namely traversable wormholes, the Alcubierre warp drive and the Krasnikov tube.…
Gauge fields are special in the sense that they are invariant under gauge transformations and they lead to problems when we try quantizing them straightforwardly. To circumvent this problem we need to specify a gauge condition to fix gauge.
Vacuum polarisation in QED in a background gravitational field induces interactions which effectively violate the strong equivalence principle and affect the propagation of light. In the low frequency limit, Drummond and Hathrell have shown…
While General Relativity ranks undoubtedly among the best physics theories ever developed, it is also among those with the most striking implications. In particular, General Relativity admits solutions which allow faster than light motion…
A recently proposed gedankenexperiment involving the (gravitational or electromagnetic) interaction between two objects--one placed in a state of quantum superposition of two locations--seems to allow for faster-than-light communication.…
Following the work of H. Ellis, we study warp drives in the gravitational field of a Schwarzschild black hole. We find that as long as the warp drive crosses the black hole horizon at a subluminal speed, the horizon would be effectively…
The Alcubierre warp drive metric is a spacetime construction where a massive particle located inside a spacetime distortion, called warp bubble, travels at velocities arbitrarily higher than the velocity of light. This theoretically…
Exploiting the gauge freedom associated with the Volkov description of a charge propagating in a plane wave background, we identify a new type of gauge choice which significantly simplifies the theory. This allows us to develop a compact…
For a slowly rotating non-magnetized white dwarf the accretion disk extends all the way to the star. Here the matter impacts and spreads towards the poles as new matter continuously piles up behind it. We have solved the 3d compressible…
A number of general issues relating to superluminal photon propagation in gravitational fields are explored. The possibility of superluminal, yet causal, photon propagation arises because of Equivalence Principle violating interactions…
Gravitational waves are thought to propagate unattenuated through matter due to a cancellation between graviton absorption and stimulated emission inferred from leading-order soft-graviton arguments. We revisit this reasoning and show that…
We investigate the propagation of a pulse field in an optomechanical system. We examine the question of advance of the pulse under the conditions of electromagnetically induced transparency in the mechanical system contained in a high…
A process for using curvature invariants is applied to evaluate the metrics for the Alcubierre and the Natario warp drives at a constant velocity.Curvature invariants are independent of coordinate bases, so plotting these invariants will be…
The light-like limit of the Kerr gravitational field relative to a distant observer moving rectilinearly in an arbitrary direction is an impulsive plane gravitational wave with a singular point on its wave front. By colliding particles with…
We discuss the conditions under which plane electromagnetic and gravitational waves can be amplified by a rotating black hole due to superradiant scattering. We show, in particular, that amplification can occur for low-frequency waves with…
It is commonly accepted that superluminal travel may be used to facilitate time travel. This is a purely special-relativistic argument, using the fact that for observers in two frames of reference, separated by a spacelike interval, the…
Motivated by a number of recent experiments, we discuss in this paper a speculative but physically admissible form and solutions of effective Maxwell-like equations describing propagation of electromagnetic field in a medium which ``feels''…
We propose a correspondence between the Morris--Thorne wormhole metric and a warp drive metric, which generalizes an earlier result by H. Ellis regarding the Schwarzschild black hole metric and makes it possible to embed a warp drive in a…