Theory HEP Seminar

Geoids in General Relativity

Marius Oltean

University of Waterloo

We develop, in the context of general relativity, the notion of a geoid — a surface of constant “gravitational potential”. In particular, we show how this idea emerges as a specific choice of a previously proposed, more general and operationally useful construction called a quasilocal frame — that is, a choice of a two-parameter family of curves in spacetime comprising the boundary of the history of a finite spatial volume. We study the geometric properties of these geoid quasilocal frames, and construct solutions for them in some simple spacetimes.