Penrose inequalities and a positive mass theorem for charged black holes in higher dimensions

We use the inverse mean curvature flow to establish Penrose-type inequalities for time-symmetric Einstein–Maxwell initial data sets which can be suitably embedded as a hypersurface in Euclidean space $R^{n+1}$, $n⩾3$. In particular, we prove a positive mass theorem for this class of charged black holes. As an application, we show that the conjectured upper bound for the area in terms of the mass and the charge, which in dimension n = 3 is relevant in connection with the cosmic censorship conjecture, always holds under the natural assumption that the horizon is stable as a minimal hypersurface. (paper)