Intrinsic Brown--York Type Mass at Infinity in Four Dimensions

Abstract

We study a Brown--York type mass for closed hypersurfaces in four-dimensional asymptotically flat manifolds. The reference mean curvature is defined intrinsically as the trace of the positive solution of the contracted Gauss equation. For large uniformly convex hypersurfaces with controlled scale, we derive an expansion consisting of a boundary term converging to the ADM mass and a shape-dependent correction. For the four-dimensional analogue of the nearly round surfaces of Shi--Wang--Wu, this correction vanishes under a natural decay compatibility condition.