Cosmological applications of the Brown-York quasilocal mass

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of the Brown-York quasilocal mass in cosmology, demonstrating its consistency with the Hawking-Hayward mass in key applications like structure formation, turnaround radius, and lensing.

Contribution

It shows that the Brown-York quasilocal mass yields results consistent with the Hawking-Hayward mass in cosmological problems at first order in perturbations.

Findings

Brown-York and Hawking-Hayward masses agree in structure formation simulations.

Both masses predict similar turnaround radii in an accelerating universe.

Lensing effects by the cosmological constant are similarly described by both masses.

Abstract

The Brown-York quasilocal energy is applied to three cosmological problems which have previously been studied with the Hawking-Hayward quasilocal energy (Newtonian simulations of large scale structure formation, turnaround radius in the present accelerating universe, and lensing by the cosmological constant). It is found that, in an appropriate gauge and to first order in the amplitude of the cosmological perturbations describing local structures, the Hawking-Hayward and the Brown-York quasilocal masses predict the same results.