Properties of Quasi-local mass in binary black hole mergers
Abstract
Identifying a general quasi-local notion of energy-momentum and angular momentum would be an important advance in general relativity with potentially important consequences for mathematical and astrophysical studies in general relativity. In this paper we study a promising approach to this problem first proposed by Wang and Yau in 2009 based on isometric embeddings of closed surfaces in Minkowski space. We study the properties of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass in high accuracy numerical simulations of the head-on collisions of two non-spinning black holes within full general relativity. We discuss the behavior of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on constant expansion surfaces and we compare its behavior with the irreducible mass. We investigate the time evolution of the Wang-Yau Quasi-local mass in numerical examples. In addition we discuss mathematical subtleties in defining the Wang-Yau mass for marginally trapped surfaces.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2308.10906,
title = {Properties of Quasi-local mass in binary black hole mergers},
author = {Daniel Pook-Kolb and Bowen Zhao and Lars Andersson and Badri Krishnan and Shing-Tung Yau},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.10906},
year = {2026}
}