Paper detail

Quasi-local Penrose inequalities with electric charge

The Riemannian Penrose inequality is a remarkable geometric inequality between the ADM mass of an asymptotically flat manifold with non-negative scalar curvature and the area of its outermost minimal surface. A version of the Riemannian Penrose inequality has also been established for the Einstein-Maxwell equations, where the lower bound on the mass also depends on the electric charge. In the context of quasi-local mass, one is interested in determining if, and for which quasi-local mass definitions, a quasi-local version of these inequalities also holds. It is known that the Brown-York quasi-local mass satisfies a quasi-local Riemannian Penrose inequality, however in the context of the Einstein-Maxwell equations, one expects that a quasi-local Riemannian Penrose inequality should also include a contribution from the electric charge. This article builds on ideas of Lu and Miao and of the first-named author to prove some charged quasi-local Penrose inequalities for a class of compact manifolds with boundary. In particular, we impose that the boundary is isometric to a closed surface in a suitable Reissner-Nordström manifold, which serves as a reference manifold for the quasi-local mass that we work with. In the case where the reference manifold has zero mass and non-zero electric charge, the lower bound on quasi-local mass is exactly the lower bound on the ADM mass given by the charged Riemannian Penrose inequality.