The Bartnik-Bray outer mass of small metric spheres in time-symmetric 3-slices (Q1709808)

The author considers a sphere with Bartnik data close to that of a round sphere in Euclidean 3-space. Subsequently he computes its Bartnik-Bray outer mass to first order in the data's deviation from the standard sphere. The Hawking mass gives a well-known lower bound, and an upper bound is obtained by estimating the mass of a static vacuum extension. As a particular case the author is confirming that in a time-symmetric slice concentric geodesic balls shrinking to a point have mass-to-volume ratio converging to the energy density at their center, in agreement with physical expectation and the behavior of other quasilocal masses. For balls shrinking to a point where the Riemann curvature tensor vanishes the author is computing the outer mass to fifth order in the radius. One found that the term is proportional to the Laplacian of the scalar curvature at the center. Meanwhile this estimate is not refined enough to identify this term in general at a point where merely the scalar curvature vanishes. The method has a deficiency: it cannot discern gravitational contributions to the mass.