Misner-Sharp Mass and the Unified First Law in Massive Gravity

Abstract: We obtain the Misner-Sharp mass in the massive gravity for a four dimensional spacetime with a two dimensional maximally symmetric subspace via the inverse unified first law method. Significantly, the stress energy is conserved in this case with a widely used reference metric. Based on this property we confirm the derived Misner-Sharp mass by the conserved charge method. We find that the existence of the Misner-sharp mass in this case does not lead to extra constraint for the massive gravity, which is notable in modified gravities. In addition, as a special case, we also investigate the Misner-Sharp mass in the static spacetime. Especially, we take the FRW universe into account for investigating the thermodynamics of the massive gravity. The result shows that the massive gravity can be in thermodynamic equilibrium, which fills in the gap in the previous studies of thermodynamics in the massive gravity.