English

Intersecting hyper-surfaces in dimensionally continued topological density gravitation

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-06-26 v4 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Differential Geometry

Abstract

We consider intersecting hypersurfaces in curved spacetime with gravity governed by a class of actions which are topological invariants in lower dimensionality. Along with the Chern-Simons boundary terms there is a sequence of intersection terms that should be added in the action functional for a well defined variational principle. We construct them in the case of Characteristic Classes, obtaining relations which have a general topological meaning. Applying them on a manifold with a discontinuous connection 1-form we obtain the gravity action functional of the system and show that the junction conditions can be found in a simple algebraic way. At the sequence of intersections there are localised independent energy tensors, constrained only by energy conservation. We work out explicitly the simplest non trivial case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.hep-th/0306220,
  title  = {Intersecting hyper-surfaces in dimensionally continued topological density gravitation},
  author = {Elias Gravanis and Steven Willison},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:hep-th/0306220},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

20 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for Journal Math. Phys. Some minor changes and corrections