Towards the classification of static vacuum spacetimes with negative cosmological constant

We present a systematic study of static solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations with negative cosmological constant which asymptotically approach the generalized Kottler ~‘‘Schwarzschild–anti-de Sitter’’! solution, within ~mainly! a conformal framework. We show connectedness of conformal infinity for appropriately regular such spacetimes. We give an explicit expression for the Hamiltonian mass of the ~not necessarily static! metrics within the class considered; in the static case we show that they have a finite and well-defined Hawking mass. We prove inequalities relating the mass and the horizon area of the ~static! metrics considered to those of appropriate reference generalized Kottler metrics. Those inequalities yield an inequality which is opposite to the conjectured generalized Penrose inequality. They can thus be used to prove a uniqueness theorem for the generalized Kottler black holes if the generalized Penrose inequality can be established. © 2001 American Institute of Physics. @DOI: 10.1063/1.1340869#