On the resilience of the gravitational variational principle under renormalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Neri, Giulio, Liberati, Stefano
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Neri, Giulio
Liberati, Stefano
author_facet Neri, Giulio
Liberati, Stefano
contents A well-defined variational principle for gravitational actions typically requires to cancel boundary terms produced by the variation of the bulk action with a suitable set of boundary counterterms. This can be achieved by carefully balancing the coefficients multiplying the bulk operators with those multiplying the boundary ones. A typical example of this construction is the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary action that needs to be added to the Einstein-Hilbert one in order to have a well-defined metric variation for General Relativity with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Quantum fluctuations of matter fields lead to the renormalization of said coefficients which may or may not preserve this balance. Indeed, already at the level of General Relativity, the resilience of the matching between bulk and boundary constants is far from obvious and it is anyway incomplete given that matter generically induces quadratic curvature operators. We investigate here the resilience of the matching of higher-order couplings upon renormalization by a non-minimally coupled scalar field and show that a problem is present. Even though we do not completely solve the latter, we show that it can be greatly ameliorated by a wise splitting between dynamical and topological contributions. Doing so, we find that the bulk-boundary matching is preserved up to a universal term, whose nature and possible cancellation we shall discuss in the end.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_17505
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the resilience of the gravitational variational principle under renormalization
Neri, Giulio
Liberati, Stefano
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
A well-defined variational principle for gravitational actions typically requires to cancel boundary terms produced by the variation of the bulk action with a suitable set of boundary counterterms. This can be achieved by carefully balancing the coefficients multiplying the bulk operators with those multiplying the boundary ones. A typical example of this construction is the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary action that needs to be added to the Einstein-Hilbert one in order to have a well-defined metric variation for General Relativity with Dirichlet boundary conditions. Quantum fluctuations of matter fields lead to the renormalization of said coefficients which may or may not preserve this balance. Indeed, already at the level of General Relativity, the resilience of the matching between bulk and boundary constants is far from obvious and it is anyway incomplete given that matter generically induces quadratic curvature operators. We investigate here the resilience of the matching of higher-order couplings upon renormalization by a non-minimally coupled scalar field and show that a problem is present. Even though we do not completely solve the latter, we show that it can be greatly ameliorated by a wise splitting between dynamical and topological contributions. Doing so, we find that the bulk-boundary matching is preserved up to a universal term, whose nature and possible cancellation we shall discuss in the end.
title On the resilience of the gravitational variational principle under renormalization
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
High Energy Physics - Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17505