A positive mass theorem for Lipschitz metrics with small singular sets

Abstract

We prove that the positive mass theorem applies to Lipschitz metrics as long as the singular set is low-dimensional, with no other conditions on the singular set. More precisely, let $g$ be an asymptotically flat Lipschitz metric on a smooth manifold $M^n$, such that $n<8$ or $M$ is spin. As long as $g$ has bounded $C^2$ norm and nonnegative scalar curvature on the complement of some singular set $S$ of Minkowski dimension less than $n/2$, the mass of $g$ must be nonnegative. We conjecture that the dimension of $S$ need only be less than $n-1$ for the result to hold. These results complement and contrast with earlier results of H. Bray, P. Miao, and Y. Shi and L.-F. Tam, where $S$ is a hypersurface.