Related papers: The Weiss Variation of the Gravitational Action
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…
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…
A well-defined variational principle for gravitational actions typically requires to cancel boundary terms produced by the variation of the bulk action with a suitable set of boundary counterterms. This can be achieved by carefully…
In this paper, we analyze the variation of the gravitational action on a bounded region of spacetime whose boundary contains segments with various characters, including null. We develop a systematic approach to decompose the derivative of…
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 main goal of this paper is to get in a straightforward form the field equations in metric f(R) gravity, using elementary variational principles and adding a boundary term in the action, instead of the usual treatment in an equivalent…
This paper is aimed at a (mostly) pedagogical exposition of the derivation of the motion equations of certain modifications of general relativity. Here we derive in all detail the motion equations in the Brans-Dicke theory with the cubic…
A new variational approach for general relativity and modified theories of gravity is presented. In addition to the metric tensor, two independent affine connections enter the action as dynamical variables. In the matter action the…
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…
We present an alternative nonconservative gravitational theory based on the Herglotz variational principle in a fully covariant form. The present model may be seen as an improvement of the theory proposed in Ref. [Lazo et al, Phys. Rev. D…
A key tenet of general relativity is the dynamical nature of space-time, ideally represented as an initial value problem. Here we explore the variational formulation of classical Einstein-Hilbert gravity as initial value problem by…
Einstein's vierbein formulation of general relativity based on the notion of distant parallelism (teleparallelism) naturally introduces a covariant surface term in addition to the Einstein-Hilbert action. We investigate the action principle…
We provide a well-defined variational principle for 3-dimensional flat space Einstein gravity by adding one half of the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term to the bulk action. We check the 0-point function, recovering consistency with…
A generalization to the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term for metric $f(R)$ gravity theories is introduced. A redefinition of the Gibbons-Hawking-York term is proposed. The proposed new definition is used to derive a consistent set of…
A simple general relativity theory for objects moving in gravitational fields is developed based on studying the behavior of an atom in a gravitational field. The theory is applied to calculate the satellite time dilation, light deflection…
In this article we investigate mathematically the variant of post-Newtonian mechanics using generalized fractional derivatives. The relativistic-covariant generalization of the classical equations for gravitational field is studied. The…
An action principle of singular hypersurfaces in general relativity and scalar-tensor type theories of gravity in the Einstein frame is presented without assuming any symmetry. The action principle is manifestly doubly covariant in the…
We present an action principle formulation for the study of motion of an extended body in General Relativity in the limit of weak gravitational field. This gives the classical equations of motion for multipole moments of arbitrary order…
The field equations of general relativity can be derived from the Einstein action, which is quadratic in connection coefficients, rather than the standard action involving the Gibbons-Hawking-York term and counterterm. We show that it is…
Motivated by recent developments in the theory of gravitation, we revisit the idea of topological variations, originally introduced by Wheeler and Hawking, from a rigorous perspective. Starting from a localized version of the…