Related papers: On the resilience of the gravitational variational…
A consistent variational procedure applied to the gravitational action requires according to Gibbons and Hawking a certain balance between the volume and boundary parts of the action. We consider the problem of preserving this balance in…
The bulk (Einstein-Hilbert) and boundary (Gibbons-Hawking) terms in the gravitational action are generally renormalized differently when integrating out quantum fluctuations. The former is affected by nonminimal couplings, while the latter…
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…
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 discuss the criteria that must be satisfied by a well-posed variational principle. We clarify the role of Gibbons-Hawking-York type boundary terms in the actions of higher derivative models of gravity, such as F(R) gravity, and argue…
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…
Variational principles in mechanics, field theory and geometric analysis are usually formulated on closed admissible classes, where boundary variations are either fixed or independently cancelled through natural boundary conditions.…
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…
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 Weiss variational principle in mechanics and classical field theory is a variational principle which allows displacements of the boundary. We review the Weiss variation in mechanics and classical field theory, and present a novel…
A variational principle is constructed for gravity coupled to an asymptotically linear dilaton and a p-form field strength. This requires the introduction of appropriate surface terms -- also known as `boundary counterterms' -- in the…
The Wilsonian renormalization group (RG) requires Euclidean signature. The conformal factor of the metric then has a wrong-sign kinetic term, which has a profound effect on its RG properties. In particular around the Gaussian fixed point,…
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…
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…
The Euclidean path integral for gravity is enriched by the addition of boundaries, which provide useful probes of thermodynamic properties. Common boundary conditions include Dirichlet conditions on the boundary induced metric;…
The path integral of 4D Einstein-Hilbert gravity for the de Sitter-like Universe with fluctuations is investigated, and the transition amplitude from one boundary configuration to another is computed. The gravitational system is described…
We present a new derivation of gravitational entropy functionals in higher-curvature theories of gravity using corner terms that are needed to ensure well-posedness of the variational principle in the presence of corners. This is…
On an interval compactification in supersymmetric theory, boundary conditions for bulk fields must be treated carefully. If they are taken arbitrarily following the requirement that a theory is supersymmetric, the conditions could give…
We examine how the Einstein-Hilbert action is renormalized by adding the usual counterterms and additional corner counterterms when the boundary surface has corners. A bulk geometry asymptotic to $H^{d+1}$ can have boundaries $S^k \times…
The Quantum renormalization group (QRG) is a realisation of holography through a coarse graining prescription that maps the beta functions of a quantum field theory thought to live on the `boundary' of some space to holographic actions in…