Alcubierre Warp Drive: Intro Paper for GR Students

[DEvens]

TL;DR

What's a good intro to the Alcubierre warp drive

I would like to read about the Alcubierre warp drive. Is there a good introductory paper?

I have done some GR, round about 8 months worth in undergrad [mumble] years ago. And my honors project was on interior solutions for stellar collapse. So I'm OK with GR at about the speed of Weinberg's book _Gravitation and Cosmology_. Is there a good backgrounder type document on the Alcubierre solution? I think I also need to learn the ADM formalism, though not entirely sure about that.

Right now I have basically rooted through arxiv.org and got all the papers I could find on the subject. I left off the quantum mechanics related ones. These are primarily research oriented papers. I'm hoping for more of a teaching type document. Upper level undergrad or graduate level will probably be acceptable.

 

[phyzguy]

I think the Alcubierre drive is more science fiction than science, so you shouldn't expect to find many scientific papers. There is no reason to believe that the required negative energy matter actually exists. Have you tried looking up the peer-reviewed papers in this Wikipedia link?

 

[DEvens]

I think the Alcubierre drive is more science fiction than science, so you shouldn't expect to find many scientific papers. There is no reason to believe that the required negative energy matter actually exists. Have you tried looking up the peer-reviewed papers in this Wikipedia link?

Yes, I'm working through those. Most of them are available online in one form or another. As you said, they are mostly research journal articles. I was hoping for something more review-ish. I can struggle through most of their content. When they start pulling topology theorems I sort of glaze over, but other than that I'm mostly good.

Yes it's sci-fi. And it seems reasonable to expect it that change. But it's interesting still. General relativity is a subject that it's easy to get absorbed in. And exact solutions with weird properties are particularly keen.