In one minute

Abhishek Chowdhury extends the Alcubierre-Natário family of warp drives to an infinite class of spacetimes with similar properties. The construction uses Martel-Poisson charts, close relatives of the Painlevé-Gullstrand form, on Minkowski, anti-de Sitter and de Sitter backgrounds. Its key feature is a non-flat spatial metric that creates conical singularities at the origin in three dimensions and a nonzero Ricci scalar away from the origin in higher dimensions. Analysing how space expands and contracts and how these drives violate the null energy condition reveals scalings set by the global imprint of the conical defects. Light-cone tilting, event horizons and several generalisations are also worked out.

Warp drives and Martel-Poisson charts