Negative mass | EPFL Graph Search

In theoretical physics, negative mass is a hypothetical type of exotic matter whose mass is of opposite sign to the mass of normal matter, e.g. −1 kg. Such matter would violate one or more energy conditions and show some strange properties such as the oppositely oriented acceleration for an applied force orientation. It is used in certain speculative hypothetical technologies, such as time travel to the past and future, construction of traversable artificial wormholes, which may also allow for time travel, Krasnikov tubes, the Alcubierre drive, and potentially other types of faster-than-light warp drives. Currently, the closest known real representative of such exotic matter is a region of negative pressure density produced by the Casimir effect. In December 2018, astrophysicist Jamie Farnes from the University of Oxford proposed a "dark fluid" theory, related, in part, to notions of gravitationally repulsive negative masses, presented earlier by Albert Einstein, that may help better understand, in a testable manner, the considerable amounts of unknown dark matter and dark energy in the cosmos. Negative mass is any region of space in which for some observers the mass density is measured to be negative. This may occur due to a region of space in which the sum of the three normal stress components (pressure on each of three axes) of the Einstein stress–energy tensor is larger in magnitude than the mass density. All of these are violations of one or another variant of the positive energy condition of Einstein's general theory of relativity; however, the positive energy condition is not a required condition for the mathematical consistency of the theory. In considering negative mass, it is important to consider which of these concepts of mass are negative. Ever since Newton first formulated his theory of gravity, there have been at least three conceptually distinct quantities called mass: inertial mass – the mass m that appears in Newton's second law of motion, F = m a "active" gravitational mass – the mass that produces a gravitational field that other masses respond to "passive" gravitational mass – the mass that responds to an external gravitational field by accelerating.

On the Generalization of Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum

Volkan Cevher, Kimon Antonakopoulos

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we first show that th ...

Brookline2024

A proof of the instability of AdS for the Einstein-massless Vlasov system

Georgios Moschidis

In recent years, the conjecture on the instability of Anti-de Sitter spacetime, put forward by Dafermos-Holzegel (Dynamic instability of solitons in 4 + 1 dimesnional gravity with negative cosmological constant, 2006. https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/similar to ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

Tomographic reconstruction of the runaway distribution function in TCV using multispectral synchrotron images

Basil Duval, Joan Decker, Umar Sheikh, Artur Perek, Gergely Papp

Synchrotron radiation observed in a quiescent Tokamak a Configuration Variable (TCV) runaway discharge is studied using filtered camera images targeting three distinct wavelength intervals. Through the tomographic simultaneous algebraic reconstruction tech ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2021