title: Quasilocal mass in general relativity.
abstract: There have been many attempts to define the notion of quasilocal mass for a spacelike two 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 non-negative 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.
authors.affiliation: Columbia University, Department of Mathematics, 2990 Broadway, New York, New York 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Mu-Tao
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Shing-Tung
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Yau