THE GRAVITATIONAL ENERGY PROBLEM FOR COSMOLOGICAL MODELS IN TELEPARALLEL GRAVITY

Abstract

We present a method to calculate the gravitational energy when asymptotic boundary conditions for the space–time are not given. This is the situation for most of the cosmological models. The expression for the gravitational energy is obtained in the context of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. We apply our method first to the Schwarzschild–de Sitter solution of Einstein's equation, and then to the Robertson–Walker universe. We show that in the first case our method leads to an average energy density of the vacuum space–time, and in the latter case the energy vanishes in the case of null curvature.