Related papers: Variational Principle for Gravity with Null and No…
We investigate the variational principle for the gravitational field in the presence of thin shells of completely unconstrained signature (generic shells). Such variational formulations have been given before for shells of timelike and null…
The recently proposed technique to regularize the divergences of the gravitational action on non-compact space by adding boundary counterterms is studied. We propose prescription for constructing the boundary counterterms which are…
A general $f(\mathcal{R})$ gravitational theory is considered within the Palatini formalism. By applying the variational principle and the usual conditions on the boundary, we show explicitly that a surface term remains such that as in…
The Weiss variation of the Einstein-Hilbert action with an appropriate boundary term has been studied for general boundary surfaces; the boundary surfaces can be spacelike, timelike, or null. To achieve this we introduce an auxiliary…
The Hamiltonian for physical systems and dynamic geometry generates the evolution of a spatial region along a vector field. It includes a boundary term which not only determines the value of the Hamiltonian, but also, via the boundary term…
This paper generalizes earlier work on Hamiltonian boundary terms by omitting the requirement that the spacelike hypersurfaces $\Sigma_t$ intersect the timelike boundary $\cal B$ orthogonally. The expressions for the action and Hamiltonian…
Using the method of images we derive the boundary term of the Einstein-$\Gamma^2$ action in half-space from the spherical worldsheet to first order in $\alpha'$ and to linear order in the metric perturbation around flat half-space. The…
In this paper we wish to find the corresponding Gibbons-Hawking-York term for the most general quadratic in curvature gravity by using Coframe slicing within the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) decomposition of spacetime in four dimensions. In…
A variational principle was recently suggested by Goenner, where an independent metric generates the spacetime connection. It is pointed out here that the resulting theory is equivalent to the usual Palatini theory. However, a bimetric…
In this note, we show that the noncovariant metric boundary term obtained from the nonlinear sigma model worldsheet derivation of the bulk off-shell sphere partition function is closely related to the Einstein boundary term in the…
Gibbons-Hawking-York (GHY) terms are typically neglected when performing dimensional reductions of gravitational theories. We consider the reduction of such terms for both two-derivative and four-derivative theories in general dimensions.…
A connection-independent formulation of general relativity is presented, in which the dynamics does not depend on the choice of connection. The gravity action in this formulation includes one additional scalar term in addition to the…
We study the conditions of integrability when the boundary terms are considered in the variation of the geometric contribution of the Einstein-Hilbert action. We explore the emergent physical dynamics that is obtained when we make a…
Starting from the original Einstein action, sometimes called the Gamma squared action, we propose a new setup to formulate modified theories of gravity. This can yield a theory with second order field equations similar to those found in…
After reformulating $F($Riemann$)$ gravity theory as a second derivative theory by introducing two auxiliary fields to the bulk action, we derive the surface term as well as the corner term supplemented to the bulk action for a generic…
The effective action of string theory on a spacetime manifold with boundary has both bulk and boundary terms. We propose that both bulk and boundary actions, may be found by imposing the effective action to be invariant under the gauge…
We study the generally covariant theory governing an isotropic spacetime region with uniform energy density. Gibbons, Hawking and York showed that fixing the induced boundary metric yields a well-posed variational problem. However, as we…
We investigate the Brown-York stress tensor for curvature-squared theories. This requires a generalized Gibbons-Hawking term in order to establish a well-posed variational principle, which is achieved in a universal way by reducing the…
A comparison between the two possible variational principles for the study of a free falling spinless particle in a space-time with torsion is noted. It is well known that the autoparallel trajectories can be obtained from a variational…
Variational formalism in the extended phase space for fields is applied to gravity. It is shown that the requirement of invariance under arbitrary local inertial frames implies a coupling of torsion to a 3-form of matter fields on the one…