Boundary and corner terms in the action for general relativity

DOI10.1088/1361-6382/AA6014zbMATH Open1368.83014arXiv1612.00149OpenAlexW3104276152MaRDI QIDQ5348161FDOQ5348161

I. Jubb, Rafael D. Sorkin, Joseph Samuel, Sumati Surya

Publication date: 14 August 2017

Published in: Classical and Quantum Gravity (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: 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 null and consider metric variations in which only the pullback of the metric to the boundary is held fixed. Allowing all such metric variations we present a unified treatment of the spacelike, timelike and null boundary components using Cartan's tetrad formalism. Apart from its computational simplicity, this formalism gives us a simple way of identifying corner terms. We also discuss "creases" which occur when the boundary is the event horizon of a black hole. Our treatment is geometric and intrinsic and we present our results both in the computationally simpler tetrad formalism as well as the more familiar metric formalism. We recover known results from a simpler and more general point of view and find some new ones.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00149

zbMATH Keywords

action principleboundary termsnull boundariesaction principle for general relativitycorner terms

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Einstein's equations (general structure, canonical formalism, Cauchy problems) (83C05) Quantization of the gravitational field (83C45) Relativistic dynamics for problems in Hamiltonian and Lagrangian mechanics (70H40)

Cited In (36)

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• Boundary effects in general relativity with tetrad variables
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• On the time dependence of holographic complexity
• Comparison of holographic and field theoretic complexities for time dependent thermofield double states
• Boundary dynamics in gravitational theories
• Emergent metric and geodesic analysis in cosmological solutions of (torsion-free) polynomial affine gravity
• A novel derivation of the boundary term for the action in Lanczos-Lovelock gravity
• A boundary term for the gravitational action with null boundaries
• Real-time gravitational replicas: low dimensional examples
• Surface counterterms and regularized holographic complexity
• Real-time gravitational replicas: formalism and a variational principle
• Geometrothermodynamics for black holes and de Sitter space
• A discretization of Holst's action for general relativity
• On variational principle and canonical structure of gravitational theory in double-foliation formalism
• A gauge-invariant symplectic potential for tetrad general relativity
• Complexity of the AdS soliton
• Covariant phase space with null boundaries
• Weiss variation for general boundaries
• General gravitational charges on null hypersurfaces
• What is a reduced boundary in general relativity?
• Variational formalism for generic shells in general relativity
• A novel probe of Einstein-Hilbert action: dynamic upgradation of metric parameters
• Renormalization of the Einstein-Hilbert action
• Does the metric play a fundamental role in the building of gravitational models?
• New boundary variables for classical and quantum gravity on a null surface
• WdW-patches in \(\mathrm{AdS}_3\) and complexity change under conformal transformations. II
• Comments on joint terms in gravitational action
• Brown-York charges with mixed boundary conditions
• Extended thermodynamics and complexity in gravitational Chern-Simons theory
• Sachs' free data in real connection variables
• Reparameterization dependence is useful for holographic complexity
• Boundary contributions in the causal set action

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