Abstract:
The Riemannian Penrose inequality is a fundamental result in mathematical general relativity and provides an estimate for the area of an outermost minimal surface in an asymptotically flat three-manifold solely in terms of the global mass. It was originally proven by Huisken and Illmanen using a weak version of the inverse mean curvature flow which has the crucial property of evolving the so-called Hawking mass in a non-decreasing way. In this talk, I will present a recent result which shows that a suitable version of the Penrose inequality continues to hold if the ambient manifold has a non-compact boundary. The main ingredient in the proof is a free boundary version of the weak inverse mean curvature flow which is obtained as the limit of a new approximation scheme accommodating for the presence of the non-compact boundary.