Generalized Alcubierrian warp drive and warp mass lowering

Abstract

In this paper, we present a modified Alcubierre warp drive metric which assumes no spherical symmetry in its shape function and is forced to be strictly flat inside the passenger region. Removal of spherical symmetry allows more freedom in choosing the boundary separating the internal flat region from the external warping region. This allows more freedom in designing the shape of the passenger area as opposed to the restrictive spherically symmetric shape commonly studied in the literature. By deriving the required total amount of exotic matter as a volume integral of the energy density all over space, we have analytically shown that axisymmetric shape functions generally require less amounts of exotic matter compared to spherically-symmetric ones for small sized warp bubbles.