Igor I. Smolyaninov*
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
Received 2 November 2010; revised 3 February 2011; published 7 September 2011
Electromagnetic metamaterials are capable of emulating many exotic space-time geometries, such as black holes, rotating cosmic strings, and the big bang singularity. This paper presents a metamaterial-based model of the Alcubierre warp drive and studies its limitations due to available range of material parameters. It appears that the material parameter range introduces strong limitations on the achievable “warp speed” so that ordinary magnetoelectric materials cannot be used. However, newly developed “perfect” bianisotropic nonreciprocal magnetoelectric metamaterials should be capable of emulating the physics of warp drive gradually accelerating up to 1/4c.
©2011 American Physical Society