In one minute

Sebastian Schuster, Jessica Santiago and Matt Visser ask what happens when a warp bubble has mass. Because a warp drive spacetime is assumed flat far away, they use the ADM mass to make the question precise. Mass can enter in three ways: as a payload, as mass carried by the bubble itself, or as a massive background the drive moves past. Working with zero-vorticity Natário drives, they compute every stress-energy component explicitly. They confirm that the null, weak, strong and dominant energy conditions are all violated, showing explicitly where, while urging that folk wisdom be checked critically.

ADM mass in warp drive spacetimes