On negative mass

Abstract

The Schwarzschild solution to the matter free, spherically symmetric Einstein equations has one free parameter, the mass. But the mass can be of any sign. What is the meaning of the negative mass solutions? The answer to this question for the case of a pure Schwarzschild negative mass black solution is still elusive, however, in this essay, we will consider negative mass solutions within a Schwarzschild-de Sitter geometry. We show that there exist reasonable configurations of matter, bubbles of distributions of matter, that satisfy the dominant energy condition everywhere, that are non-singular and well behaved everywhere, but correspond to the negative mass Schwarzschild-de Sitter geometry outside the matter distribution. These negative mass bubbles could occur as the end state of a quantum tunnelling transition.

7 pages, no figures, submitted to the Gravity Research Foundation 2013 Awards for Essays on Gravitation

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Negative mass bubbles in de Sitter space-time
• Thermodynamic geometry of static and rotating regular black holes in conformal massive gravity
• Black hole formation by incoming electromagnetic radiation
• Stable, thin wall, negative mass bubbles in de Sitter space-time
• On spacetime algebra and its relations with negative masses
• Breaching the light barrier without paradoxes
• On Regular Negative Mass Black Holes Under Unitary Time and Proper Antichronous Transformations
• Unique Gravitational-Wave Signals from Negative-Mass Binaries
• 'Stealth' singularities from self-gravitating fermions