On the wormhole-warp drive correspondence

Abstract

We propose a correspondence between the Morris-Thorne wormhole metric and a warp drive metric, which generalizes an earlier result by H. Ellis regarding the Schwarzschild black hole metric and makes it possible to embed a warp drive in a wormhole background. We demonstrate that in order to do that, one needs to also generalize the Natario-Alcubierre definition of warp drive and introduce nonzero intrinsic curvature. Surprisingly, we find out that Alcubierre warp drives cannot traverse Morris-Thorne wormholes; nonetheless, this “no-go” theorem does not extend to spherically symmetric warp drives that are not localized in space.