Superharmonic functions in \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and the Penrose inequality in general relativity (Q1811412)

The authors restrict their attention to the manifolds \((M^n,g),\) \(n\geq 3\) which are isometric to \((\mathbb R^n,u(x)^{4\slash (n-2)}\delta_{ij})\), where \(u(x)\) is a positive and superharmonic function in \((\mathbb R^n,\delta_{ij})\) and converges to a constant \(a>0\) at infinity. Suppose also that \(u(x)\) is harmonic outside a compact set \(K\), so that one can expand \(u(x)\) using spherical harmonics to get \(u(x)=a+b\slash| x| ^{n-2}+O(| x| ^{1-n}).\) Then the authors define the total mass of \((M,g)\) to be \(m:=2ab,\) also known as the ADM mass of \((M^n,g)\). For such manifolds they prove (Theorem 1.1) that \(m\geq 0,\) and \(m=0\) if and only if \(u\equiv 1.\) Then they deal with the following conjecture (Conjecture 1.2): Suppose \((M^n,g)\) is as above and contains an outer-minimizing horizon \(\Sigma\) of area \(A\). Then \(m\geq\frac{1}{2}(\frac{A}{\omega_{n-1}})^{\frac{n-2}{n-1}},\) with equality if and only if \(u(x)=a+\frac{b}{| x-x_0| ^{n-2}}\) outside \(\Sigma\), for some \(a,b>0\) and for some \(x_0\in\mathbb R^3.\) Although the above conjecture is known to be true in the dimension \(n=3\), there is no proof using only properties of superharmonic functions. In this paper the authors prove the modified conjecture for \(n=3\) by means of superharmonic functions. The main result of the paper, according to the authors, is Theorem 3.1, which is the main tool of proving the previous result. It concerns the properties of superharmonic functions on \(\mathbb R^n\) and is of independent interest.