Tuesday 12 May 2026, 16:00 - 17:00 in HG00.062
Eduardo Hafemann (Hamburg)
Scalar curvature and mass in low-regularity
It is natural to ask whether scalar curvature lower bounds can be extended to singular or merely continuous metrics in a way that remains geometrically meaningful. Such questions can be tested in the setting of the positive mass theorem, which relates nonnegative scalar curvature to the nonnegativity of the ADM mass, a global geometric invariant. In this talk, we discuss why one can expect a positive mass theorem to hold for continuous metrics. In particular, we consider the "coordinate"-isoperimetric mass, proposed by G. Huisken, as an analogue of the ADM mass for low-regularity metrics, and present some partial results under distributional lower bounds on the scalar curvature. This is based on joint work with Melanie Graf.