Negative Energy in General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory

这里讨论的研究涉及一种非常不寻常的能量形式的含义。这种所谓的“负能量”的存在是量子场论定律所允许的，量子场论描述了物质和能量在微观尺度上的行为。研究的重点是对物理定律对负能量的限制的扩展研究。这些广义的限制将涉及对负能量在时间和空间上的分布施加限制。负能量区域似乎还伴随着能量密度的大幅波动，这可能会导致负能量产生的引力场出现大幅波动。在这种情况下，这将如何影响引力的描述，在爱因斯坦的理论中，引力是空间和时间几何的曲率，目前还没有得到很好的理解。希望也能对这个问题进行调查。在实验室中已经产生了涉及负能量的情况。在这些实验中产生的负能量非常少。然而，如果物理定律对负能量没有限制，那么人们可能会创造出大量的负能量，从而产生奇异的宏观效应。然而，研究表明，量子场论确实对负能量施加了一些相当强的限制。这些约束被称为“量子不平等”，并对上述负能量的宏观效应产生了严重的限制。粗略地说，他们说大的负能量只能存在很短的时间。本研究旨在扩展这些结果的范围。

The research discussed here deals with the implications of a very unusual form of energy. The existence of this so-called "negative energy" is allowed by the laws of quantum field theory, which describe the behavior of matter and energy on microscopic scales. The focus of the research is the extended investigation of restrictions imposed by the laws of physics on negative energy. These generalized restrictions would involve the placement of constraints on the distribution of negative energy in both time and space. Regions of negative energy also appear to be accompanied by large fluctuations in energy density, which could perhaps lead to large fluctuations in the gravitational fields produced by the negative energy. How this would affect the description of gravity, given in Einstein's theory as the curvature of the geometry of space and time, in these circumstances is currently not well understood. It is hoped to investigate this issue as well.Situations involving negative energy have been produced in the laboratory. The amounts of negative energy generated in these experiments are extremely tiny. However, if the laws of physics impose no constraints on negative energy, then one might be able to create large amounts of it and thereby produce bizarre macroscopic effects. However, research has shown that quantum field theory does impose some rather strong restrictions on negative energy. These constraints have come to be known as "quantum inequalities", and yield severe limitations on the macroscopic effects of negative energy mentioned above. Loosely speaking, they say that large negative energies can exist for only short periods of time. The present research aims to extend the scope of these results.