Title:	Boundary and corner terms in the action for general relativity
Authors:	Jubb, Ian Samuel, J. Sorkin, Rafael D. Surya, Sumati
Issue Date:	23-Mar-2017
Publisher:	IOP Publishing Ltd.
Citation:	Classical and Quantum Gravity, 2017, Vol.34, p065006
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.
Description:	Restricted Access. An open-access version is available at arXiv.org (one of the alternative locations)
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2289/6707
ISSN:	0264-9381 1361-6382 (E)
Alternative Location:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.00149 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-6382/aa6014 http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017CQGra..34f5006J
Copyright:	2017 IOP Publishing Ltd.
Appears in Collections:	Research Papers (TP)

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