The Alcubierre Warp Drive in Higher Dimensional Spacetime

The canonical form of the Alcubierre warp drive metric is considered to gain insight into the mathematical mechanism triggering the effect. A parallel with the Chung-Freese spacetime metric is drawn to demonstrate that the spacetime expansion boost can be considered a 3 + 1 on-brane simplification for higher dimensional geometric effects. The implications for baryonic matter of higher dimensional spacetime, in conjunction with the Alcubierre metric, are used to illustrate an equation of state for dark energy. Finally, this combined model will then be used to outline a theoretical framework for negative pressure (an alternative to negative energy) and a conceptual lab experiment is described.

Recall that the spacetime expansion boost for the Alcubierre model could be made to be arbitrarily high depending on the choice of input variables. A high boost is clearly not an exclusive feature common only to negative energy densities and can be readily obtained in the lab provided powerful enough equipment.