Evolution of Hawking mass under perturbative spacetime uniformly expanding flows

Hollis Williams

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arXiv · 2601.12013

Evolution of Hawking mass under perturbative spacetime uniformly expanding flows

Hollis Williams

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Abstract

We present a numerical investigation of the evolution of the Hawking mass for perturbed surfaces evolving under hypersurface-restricted uniformly expanding flows in Minkowski spacetime. Although monotonicity of the Hawking mass under inverse mean curvature flow is well understood, much less is known about the behaviour of such flows in genuine spacetime contexts. To move beyond the totally geodesic setting where uniformly expanding flows reduce to Euclidean inverse mean curvature flow, we introduce controlled perturbations of the ambient extrinsic curvature. This yields a hypersurface-restricted realization of a spacetime uniformly expanding flow with a nontrivial mean curvature vector. Our results indicate that monotonicity of the Hawking mass remains stable under a range of perturbation amplitudes, angular modes, and spacetime deformations. These results provide evidence for robustness of monotonicity and establish a computational framework for future investigations of uniformly expanding flows in more general spacetime geometries.

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Hollis Williams. 2026-01-17. Evolution of Hawking mass under perturbative spacetime uniformly expanding flows. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12013

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