Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 5052–5055 (1998)Uniqueness of Scalar Field Energy and Gravitational Energy in the Radiating RegimeReceived 20 January 1998; published in the issue dated 8 June 1998 The usual approaches to the definition of energy give an ambiguous result for the energy of fields in the radiating regime. We show that for a massless scalar field in Minkowski spacetime the definition may be rendered unambiguously by adding the requirement that the energy cannot increase in retarded time. We present a similar theorem for the gravitational field, proved elsewhere, which establishes that the Trautman-Bondi energy is the unique (up to a multiplicative factor) functional, within a natural class, which is monotonic in time for all solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations admitting a smooth “piece” of conformal null infinity I. © 1998 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.5052
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.80.5052
PACS:
04.20.Cv, 03.50.-z, 11.10.Ef
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