Rigidity and the interpretation of mass with a positive cosmological constant
Abstract
We provide an explicit counterexample to the rigidity properties underlying the interpretation of mass in the presence of a positive cosmological constant . Specifically, we construct a family of regular static stellar configurations satisfying the dominant and strong energy conditions, and containing no surface layers, for which the mass parameter of the outer Schwarzschild-de Sitter region can be positive, zero, or negative. The zero-mass configuration is precisely the one for which the outer vacuum region becomes exactly de Sitter, yielding a spacetime in which a de Sitter domain coexists with regular perfect-fluid matter. This contrasts sharply with the case, where a Minkowski domain cannot coexist with perfect-fluid regions satisfying the energy conditions. These results show that the static, spherically symmetric realization of the rigidity principle associated with the positive mass theorem for does not carry over to .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.04291,
title = {Rigidity and the interpretation of mass with a positive cosmological constant},
author = {Eneko Aranguren and Raül Vera},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.04291},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures