A Primer on Energy Conditions

By Erik Curiel. 2014

237 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An energy condition, in the context of a wide class of spacetime theories (including general relativity), is, crudely speaking, a relation one demands the stress-energy tensor of matter satisfy in order to try to capture the idea that "energy should be positive". The remarkable fact I will discuss in this paper is that such simple, general, almost trivial seeming propositions have profound and far-reaching import for our understanding of the structure of relativistic spacetimes. It is therefore especially surprising when one also learns that we have no clear understanding of the nature of these conditions, what theoretical status they have with respect to fundamental physics, what epistemic status they may have, when we should and should not expect them to be satisfied, and even in many cases how they and their consequences should be interpreted physically. Or so I shall argue, by a detailed analysis of the technical and conceptual character of all the standard conditions used in physics today, including examination of their consequences and the circumstances in which they are believed to be violated.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a5f31a78962cd7f1c14ee29d694bf83f150c4ff

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Citations in the corpus

Regular Black Holes: A Short Topic Review (2023, methodology): “In summary, it is the impressionist SEC that plays the key role in constructing RBHs, not the pointillist one [155].”
Energy conditions in general relativity and quantum field theory (2020, methodology): “(19) It is not straightforward to describe the geometric meaning of the components of the Einstein tensor Gab (see [5] Footnote 11 for a detailed discussion), but when n ≥ 3 the WEC can nevertheless be given a geometric interpretation using an idea due to Feynman, cf.”
Phenomenological aspects of black holes beyond general relativity (2018, methodology): “[81] Erik Curiel, “A Primer on Energy Conditions,” Einstein Stud.”
Hairy black holes by gravitational decoupling (2020, background): “Let us recall that the energy conditions are a set of requirements which are usually imposed on the energymomentum tensor to avoid exotic matter sources, hence we can see them as sensible guidelines to avoid classically unphysical configurations [95, 96].”