Related papers: Gravitational action with null boundaries
We revisit the action principle for general relativity motivated by the path integral approach to quantum gravity. We consider a spacetime region whose boundary has piecewise $C^2$ components, each of which can be spacelike, timelike or…
The Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian has no well-defined variational derivative with respect to the metric. This issue has to be tackled by adding a suitable surface term to the action, which is a peculiar feature of gravity. We also know that…
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…
We evaluate finite part of the on-shell action for black brane solutions of Einstein gravity on different subregions of spacetime enclosed by null boundaries. These subregions include the intersection of WDW patch with past/future interior…
We examine the variational problem in Lovelock gravity when the boundary contains timelike and spacelike segments nonsmoothly glued. We show that two kinds of contributions have to be added to the action. The first one is associated to the…
A modification of General Relativity that is based on the gravitational Standard-Model Extension and incorporates nondynamical background fields has recently been studied via the ADM formalism. Our objective in this paper is to develop a…
The gravitational action is not always additive in the usual sense. We provide a general prescription for the change in action that results when different portions of the boundary of a spacetime are topologically identified. We discuss…
A variational framework for the quantization of gravitational fields is developed based on an extension of the stationary action principle. Within this framework, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for the gravitational wave functional is…
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…
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…
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…
It is common knowledge that the Einstein-Hilbert action does not furnish a well-posed variational principle. The usual solution to this problem is to add an extra boundary term to the action, called a counter-term, so that the variational…
We intend to clarify the interplay between boundary terms and conformal transformations in scalar-tensor theories of gravity. We first consider the action for pure gravity in five dimensions and show that, on compactifing a la Kaluza-Klein…
General Relativity (GR) exists in different formulations, which are equivalent in pure gravity. Once matter is included, however, observable predictions generically depend on the version of GR. In order to quantify the resulting ambiguity,…
It is well-known that the presence of a spacetime boundary requires the conventional Einstein-Hilbert (EH) action to be supplemented by the Gibbons-Hawking (GH) boundary term in order to retain the standard variational procedure. When the…
We undertake a general study of the boundary (or edge) modes that arise in gauge and gravitational theories defined on a space with boundary, either asymptotic or at finite distance, focusing on efficient techniques for computing the…
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…
As is well known, in order for the Einstein--Hilbert action to have a well defined variation, and therefore to be used for deriving field equation through the stationary action principle, it has to be amended by the addition of a suitable…
The Einstein-Hilbert action for general relativity is not well posed in terms of the metric $g_{ab}$ as a dynamical variable. There have been many proposals to obtain an well posed action principle for general relativity, e.g., addition of…
The metric-affine variational principle is applied to generate teleparallel and symmetric teleparallel theories of gravity. From the latter is discovered an exceptional class which is consistent with a vanishing affine connection. Based on…