Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2021) 136: 902
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01899-7

Regular Article

Perfect fluid warp drive solutions with the cosmological constant

¹ Physics Institute, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
² Physics Department, Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, Seropédica, Brazil
³ Physics Department, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, Brazil
⁴ Multidisciplinary Graduate Program in Applied Physics, Physics Institute, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

^c mbr@if.ufrj.br

Received: 19 July 2021
Accepted: 24 August 2021
Published online: 2 September 2021

Abstract

The Alcubierre metric describes a spacetime geometry that allows a massive particle inside a spacetime distortion, called warp bubble, to travel with superluminal global velocities. In this work, we advance solutions of the Einstein equations with the cosmological constant for the Alcubierre warp drive metric having the perfect fluid as source. We also consider the particular dust case with the cosmological constant, which generalizes our previous dust solution (Santos-Pereira et al. 2020) and led to vacuum solutions connecting the warp drive with shock waves via the Burgers equation, as well as our perfect fluid solution without the cosmological constant (Santos-Pereira et al. 2021). All energy conditions are also analyzed. The results show that the shift vector in the direction of the warp bubble motion creates a coupling in the Einstein equations that requires off-diagonal terms in the energy–momentum source. Therefore, it seems that to achieve superluminal speeds by means of the Alcubierre warp drive spacetime geometry one may require a complex configuration and distribution of energy, matter and momentum as source in order to produce a warp drive bubble. In addition, warp speeds seem to require more complex forms of matter than dust for stable solutions and that negative matter may not be a strict requirement to achieve global superluminal speeds.