Hawking energy

Hawking energy (also called the Hawking mass) is a proposed quasi-local mass in general relativity associated with a closed spacelike 2-surface in spacetime. It was introduced by Stephen Hawking in 1968 as a simple geometric quantity intended to measure the mass or energy contained within a finite region, using only geometric data defined on the bounding surface rather than at infinity.

In general relativity, a quasi-local energy aims to assign an energy (or mass) to a finite spacetime region bounded by a closed surface. Unlike global notions such as the ADM mass, quasi-local quantities depend on the geometry of the chosen surface and generally require additional conditions to exhibit physically desirable properties.

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