# Variational principle for gravity with null and non-null boundaries: a unified boundary counter-term

@article{Parattu2016VariationalPF,
title={Variational principle for gravity with null and non-null boundaries: a unified boundary counter-term},
author={Krishnamohan Parattu and Sumanta Chakraborty and Thanu Padmanabhan},
journal={The European Physical Journal C},
year={2016},
volume={76},
pages={1-5}
}
• Published 23 February 2016
• Mathematics, Physics
• The European Physical Journal C
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 principle becomes well-posed. When the boundary is spacelike or timelike, the Gibbons–Hawking–York counter-term is the most widely used. For null boundaries, we had proposed a counter-term in a previous paper. In this paper, we extend the previous analysis and… Expand
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