Quasi-local mass at null infinity in Bondi-Sachs coordinates
Po-Ning Chen, Mu-Tao Wang, Ye-Kai Wang, and Shing-Tung Yau

TL;DR
This paper computes the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass at null infinity in Bondi-Sachs coordinates, providing a local description of gravitational radiation and connecting it to the news function, thus offering new insights into gravitational energy.
Contribution
It introduces a method to evaluate quasi-local mass at null infinity in Bondi-Sachs coordinates, linking it to gravitational radiation via the news function.
Findings
Quasi-local mass converges to a limit at null infinity.
The mass is expressed in terms of the news function.
Provides a local perspective on gravitational radiation.
Abstract
There are two important statements regarding the Trautman-Bondi mass at null infinity: one is the positivity, and the other is the Bondi mass loss formula, which are both global in nature. In this note, we compute the limit of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on unit spheres at null infinity of an asymptotically flat spacetime in the Bondi-Sachs coordinates. The quasi-local mass leads to a local description of the radiation that is purely gravitational at null infinity. In particular, the quasi-local mass is evaluated in terms of the news function of the Bondi-Sachs coordinates.
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlack Holes and Theoretical Physics · Advanced Differential Geometry Research · Cosmology and Gravitation Theories
Quasi-local mass at null infinity in Bondi-Sachs coordinates
Po-Ning Chen, Mu-Tao Wang, Ye-Kai Wang, and Shing-Tung Yau
Abstract.
There are two important statements regarding the Trautman-Bondi mass [3, 28, 36, 32, 33] at null infinity: one is the positivity [29, 19], and the other is the Bondi mass loss formula [3], which are both global in nature. In this note, we compute the limit of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on unit spheres at null infinity of an asymptotically flat spacetime in the Bondi-Sachs coordinates. The quasi-local mass leads to a local description of the radiation that is purely gravitational at null infinity. In particular, the quasi-local mass is evaluated in terms of the news function of the Bondi-Sachs coordinates.
P.-N. Chen is supported by NSF grant DMS-1308164 and Simons Foundation collaboration grant #584785, M.-T. Wang is supported by NSF grant DMS-1405152 and DMS-1810856, Y.-K. Wang is supported by MOST Taiwan grant 105-2115-M-006-016-MY2, 107-2115-M-006-001-MY2, and S.-T. Yau is supported by NSF grants PHY-0714648 and DMS-1308244. The authors would like to thank the National Center for Theoretical Sciences at National Taiwan University where part of this research was carried out
1. Introduction
An observer of the gravitational radiation created by an astronomical event is situated at future null infinity, where light rays emitted from the source approach. The study of the theory of gravitational radiation at null infinity in the last century culminated in a series of papers by Bondi and his collaborators [3, 28, 36, 32, 33], in which the Bondi-Trautman mass and the mass loss formula at null infinity are well understood. In particular, the Bondi-Trautman mass was proved to be positive in the work of Schoen-Yau [29] and Horowitz-Perry [19]. Both the positivity of mass and the mass loss formula are global statements on null infinity: knowledge of the mass aspect is required in every direction. For reasons that are both theoretical and experimental, it is highly desirable to have a quasi-local statement of mass/radiation at null infinity.
In [11, 12], we embarked on the evaluation the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on surfaces of fixed size near null infinity of a linear gravitational perturbation of the Schwarzschild spacetime. The ideas and technique in [11, 12] were further developed to address the case of the Vaidya spacetime in [15]. The construction of these spheres of unit size at null infinity will be reviewed in the next section. In the Vaidya case, we proved in [15] that the quasi-local mass of a unit size sphere at null infinity is directly related to the derivative of the mass aspect function with respect to the retarded time . In particular, the positivity of the quasi-local mass is implied by the decreasing of the mass aspect function in . In this article, we take on the general case of an asymptotically flat spacetime described in the Bondi-Sachs coordinates. The Vaidya spacetime contains matter which contributes to the radiation. A general vacuum spacetime in the Bondi-Sachs coordinates allows us to investigate radiation that is purely gravitational.
A new ingredient in this article is a variational formula (see Theorem 4.1) which facilitates a much more straightforward computation of the than the one in [15]. Similar to [15], it is still crucial to compute the term of the optimal embedding. This is done in Lemma 5.1 and Lemma 5.2 of the current article. As in Lemma 3.3 of [15], the optimal embedding equation is reduced to two ordinary differential equations. However, it does not seem possible to obtain explicit solutions to the ODE’s as in the Vaidya case. The quasi-local mass is then evaluated by combining Theorem 4.1 and the optimal embedding.
The structure of the paper is as follows: in Section 2, we review the general framework of the quasi-local mass at null infinity. In Section 3, we compute the geometric quantities on the spheres at null infinity that are necessary to evaluate the quasi-local mass. In Section 4, we derived the formula for the leading order term of the quasi-local mass. In Section 5, we evaluate the quasi-local mass based on the formula derived in Section 4. See Theorem 5.3. In the last section, Section 6, we look at several special examples.
2. General framework of quasilocal mass at null infinity
We consider a null geodesic parametrized by an affine parameter with and a family of surfaces for centered at in the following sense. For each fixed and , is a surface that bounds a ball with , such that as , we have . We evaluate the quasilocal mass of as . In particular, when , is the unit sphere limit referred on our previous work.
In practice, such an evaluation is conducted by choosing a family of parametrizations from the unit ball , and considering the pull-backs of geometric quantities on as geometric quantities on that depend on the parameter . In particular, is the image of the sphere of radius in under . The unit sphere limit is obtained by setting and taking the limit as .
When the spacetime is equipped with a global structure at null infinity that corresponds to limits of null geodesics, these unit sphere limits provide information of gravitational radiation observed at null infinity. We illustrate the construction in the Vaidya case where the spacetime metric takes the simple form:
[TABLE]
We first consider a global coordinate change from to with and . In terms of the new coordinate system , the parametrization is then given by
[TABLE]
where is a coordinate system on and the constants satisfies and indicates the direction of the null geodesic which is parametrized by . Along the ball centered at a point on the null geodesic in the direction of , we have
[TABLE]
where
[TABLE]
The pull-back of the global coordinate under defines functions on depending on . As we have
[TABLE]
where are defined such that , and .
3. Unit sphere at null infinity in Bondi-Sachs coordinates
The spacetime metric in Bondi-Sachs coordinates is given by
[TABLE]
Substituting , the metric becomes, up to lower order terms,
[TABLE]
The unit timelike normal of slice is given by
[TABLE]
We compute
[TABLE]
to get the second fundamental form of slice
[TABLE]
A null geodesic with corresponds to points with the new coordinates
[TABLE]
Let . We consider the sphere of (Euclidean) radius centered at a point on the null geodesic and the ball bounded by in -slice. Namely,
[TABLE]
In this article, we study the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass of the family of surfaces defined in (3.3) as using the frame work outlined in Section 2. Namely, we consider a family of embedding
[TABLE]
In particular, maps the sphere of radius , in onto . The pull-backs of , and under defines tensors on depending on . By (2.1), their limits as depend only on . We define the following:
Definition 3.1**.**
We define , and to be functions of a single variable such that
[TABLE]
We use , and to denote the derivative of these functions with respect to .
We consider the following two functions and . Together with , they form an orthogonal basis of first eigenfunctions on . We refer to these two functions as .
In terms of and , the transformation formula [15, page 3] gives
[TABLE]
Let be the pull-back of the metric on the hypersurface by . In terms of the coordinate system on , we have
[TABLE]
We first compute geometric data on .
Lemma 3.2**.**
On ,
[TABLE]
Remark*.*
In the proof, we denote functions such as , and by , and .
Proof.
On , we have
[TABLE]
The computation on is similar. We get a factor of after each derivative. ∎
Lemma 3.3**.**
On ,
[TABLE]
Proof.
The unit normal of is . By (3.6), we have
[TABLE]
By (3.2), we get
[TABLE]
The assertion follows from .
∎
4. The expansion of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass
We consider the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on the unit sphere constructed in the previous section.
Theorem 4.1**.**
For ,
[TABLE]
where is the solution to the optimal embedding equation
[TABLE]
Proof.
We write
[TABLE]
where and denote the Brown-York mass and the Liu-Yau mass, respectively. From Lemma 3.1 of [7], we conclude
[TABLE]
where we also use the vacuum constraint equation
[TABLE]
It is easy to see that
[TABLE]
From the second variation of the Wang-Yau mass in [8, 9], we have
[TABLE]
Finally, we apply (3.2) to evaluate and . ∎
5. Evaluating the qausi-local mass
Recall the terms of the metric coefficients on
[TABLE]
To apply Theorem 4.1, we need to compute and . We first derive a formula for .
Lemma 5.1**.**
Let be a trace-free, symmetric 2-tensor that solves the ODE
[TABLE]
for each . Here means . Then the difference of second fundamental forms on the sphere of radius is given by
[TABLE]
Proof.
We start with . The unit normal is given by
[TABLE]
We compute
[TABLE]
For , we expand the isometric embedding as
[TABLE]
where denote the unit sphere in . We decompose into . The linearized isometric embedding equation reads
[TABLE]
From the computation in [35, pages 938-939], (5.10) implies that
[TABLE]
Putting these together, we obtain
[TABLE]
To solve , we consider the expansion of the Gauss curvature of . Let
[TABLE]
On the one hand, from the metric expansion, we get
[TABLE]
On the other hand, combining (5.11) and the Gauss equation, we conclude that
[TABLE]
As a result, is the solution of
[TABLE]
For the right hand side, we compute
[TABLE]
On the other hand, let and be an antiderivative of and respectively, and satisfy (5.9). One verifies that
[TABLE]
solves the linearized isometric embedding equation (5.13) since, for a trace-free, symmetric 2-tensor ,
[TABLE]
We are ready compute (5.12) where is given in (5.14). We have
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
We see that terms involving cancel and the result has the asserted form. ∎
Next we compute .
Lemma 5.2**.**
Define the second order differential operator
[TABLE]
Let be a traceless, symmetric 2-tensor that solves the ODE
[TABLE]
Then
[TABLE]
solves the leading order of optimal embedding equation
[TABLE]
Proof.
The equation is linear. We look for and such that
[TABLE]
From Lemma 3.3 of [15], solves the first equation
[TABLE]
It is straightforward to verify that solves the second equation if the traceless, symmetric 2-tensor solves (5.15).∎
We are ready to state the main theorem for the quasi-local mass,
Theorem 5.3**.**
For and solves the leading order term of the optimal embedding equation, the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy
[TABLE]
where is as determined in Lemma 5.1 and is as determined in Lemma 5.2.
Proof.
We start with Theorem 4.1 in which is as determined in Lemma 5.1 and is as determined in Lemma 5.2. We simplify the expression
[TABLE]
We have
[TABLE]
by [15, (3.6)]. This finishes the proof of the theorem. ∎
In particular, we observe that the answer depends on the leading order term of the news function on since both ODEs in Lemma 5.1 and Lemma 5.2 are linear ODEs where the right-hand side depends on and their derivatives. In general, we do not have explicit solutions to these ODEs. In the following section, we compute the quasi-local mass explicitly for a few special examples.
6. Special cases
Write . We evaluate for a few special cases of . Let be two constant symmetric traceless 2-tensors.
Proposition 6.1**.**
If .
Proof.
One verifies that
[TABLE]
solve (5.9) and (5.15) respectively. Direct computation shows that . Hence,
[TABLE]
where we used the identity
[TABLE]
∎
Proposition 6.2**.**
If Then .
Proof.
One verifies that
[TABLE]
solve (5.9) and (5.15) respectively. Direct computation shows that
[TABLE]
We compute
[TABLE]
to get
[TABLE]
Denote . The volume integral contributes
[TABLE]
and the surface integral contributes
[TABLE]
where we used the identity . ∎
The reference list from the paper itself. Each links out to its DOI / PubMed record.
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- 3[3] H. Bondi, M. G. J. van der Burg, and A. W. K. Metzner, Gravitational waves in general relativity. VII. Waves from axi-symmetric isolated systems , Proc. Roy. Soc. Ser. A 269 (1962) 21–52.
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- 7[7] P.-N. Chen, M.-T. Wang, Y.-K, Wang, and S.-T. Yau, Quasi-local mass on unit spheres at spatial infinity , in preparation
- 8[8] P.-N. Chen, M.-T. Wang, and S.-T. Yau, Evaluating quasi-local energy and solving optimal embedding equation at null infinity , Comm. Math. Phys. 308 (2011), no.3, 845–863.
