The Hawking energy in a perturbed Friedmann-Lemaître universe

Abstract

Hawking's quasi-local energy definition quantifies the energy enclosed by a spacelike 2-sphere in terms of the amount of lightbending on the sphere caused by the energy distribution inside the sphere. This paper establishes for the first time a direct connection between the formal mathematical definition of a quasi-local energy and observations, in the context of cosmological perturbation theory. This is achieved by studying the Hawking Energy of spherical sections of the past lightcone of a cosmic observer in a perturbed Friedmann-Lemaître spacetime. We express the Hawking Energy in terms of gauge-invariant perturbation variables and comment on the cosmic observables needed to in principle measure it. We then calculate its angular power spectrum and interpret its contributions.