Quasilocal mass in general relativity
Abstract
Description
There have been many attempts to define the notion of quasilocal mass for a spacelike 2-surface in spacetime by the Hamilton-Jacobi analysis. The essential difficulty in this approach is to identify the right choice of the background configuration to be subtracted from the physical Hamiltonian. Quasilocal mass should be nonnegative for surfaces in general spacetime and zero for surfaces in flat spacetime. In this letter, we propose a new definition of gauge-independent quasilocal mass and prove that it has the desired properties.
10 pages, editorial changes made to comply with journal's page limit, to appear in Physical Review Letters
10 pages, editorial changes made to comply with journal's page limit, to appear in Physical Review Letters