Matt Visser
Matt Visser (born 1958) is a New Zealand-born mathematical physicist at Victoria University of Wellington, specializing in general relativity, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, and the physics of wormholes. His 1996 monograph Lorentzian Wormholes: From Einstein to Hawking is the standard reference on the physics of traversable wormholes, energy condition violations, exotic matter requirements, and the relationship between wormholes and time travel.
Key contributions
- Introduced the thin-shell wormhole construction (1989), showing that exotic matter can be confined to an arbitrarily thin surface at the wormhole throat.
- Systematically analyzed all known energy conditions and catalogued the quantum field theory effects that violate them.
- Showed that the total amount of exotic matter threading a wormhole can be made arbitrarily small (though never exactly zero) in thin-shell constructions.
- Analyzed the Alcubierre drive energy requirements and demonstrated that the total negative energy needed scales with the size of the warp bubble.