Mass from an Extrinsic Point of View

Abstract

We express the $q$-th Gauss-Bonnet-Chern mass of an immersed submanifold of Euclidean space as a linear combination of two terms: the total $(2q)$-th mean curvature and the integral, over the entire manifold, of the inner product between the $(2q+1)$-th mean curvature vector and the position vector of the immersion. As a consequence, we obtain, for each $q$, a geometric inequality that holds whenever the positive mass theorem (for the $q$-th Gauss-Bonnet-Chern mass) holds.