A proposal of quasi-local mass for 2-surfaces of timelike mean curvature

TL;DR

This paper extends the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass to include surfaces with timelike mean curvature vectors, enabling analysis of trapped surfaces and providing a positive definite energy density in general relativity.

Contribution

It introduces a new quasi-local mass definition for surfaces with timelike mean curvature vectors, broadening the applicability of existing quasi-local energy concepts.

Findings

The new definition applies to trapped surfaces.

It yields a positive definite surface energy density.

Calculations in Kerr spacetime demonstrate its effectiveness.

Abstract

A quasi-local mass, typically defined as an integral over a spacelike $2$-surface $\Sigma$, should encode information about the gravitational field within a finite, extended region bounded by $\Sigma$. Therefore, in attempts to quantize gravity, one may consider an infinite dimensional space of $2$-surfaces instead of an infinite dimensional space of $4$-dimensional Lorentzian spacetimes. However, existing definitions for quasilocal mass only applies to surfaces outside an horizon whose mean curvature vector is spacelike. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy/mass to surfaces with timelike mean curvature vector, including in particular trapped surfaces. We adopt the same canonical gauge as in the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy but allow the pulled back "killing vector" to the physical spacetime to be spacelike. We define the new quasi-local energy along the Hamiltonian formulation of the Wang-Yau quasi-local energy. The new definition yields a positive definite surface energy density and a new divergence free current. Calculations for coordinate spheres in Kerr family spacetime are shown. In the spherical symmetric case, our definition reduces to a previous definition \cite{lundgren2007self}.