English

Field equations for Lovelock gravity: An alternative route

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-04-23 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We present an alternative derivation of the gravitational field equations for Lovelock gravity starting from the Newton's law, which is closer in spirit to the thermodynamic description of gravity. As a warm up exercise, we have explicitly demonstrated that projecting the Riemann curvature tensor appropriately and taking a cue from Poisson's equation, the Einstein's equations immediately follow. The above derivation naturally generalizes to Lovelock gravity theories where an appropriate curvature tensor satisfying the symmetries as well as the Bianchi derivative properties of the Riemann tensor has to be used. Interestingly, in the above derivation, the thermodynamic route to gravitational field equations, suited for null hypersurfaces, emerge quiet naturally.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.07366,
  title  = {Field equations for Lovelock gravity: An alternative route},
  author = {Sumanta Chakraborty},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07366},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Invited Article; 11 pages, no figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:26:16.044Z