Notes on Derivation of 'Generalized Gravitational Entropy'

Abstract

An alternative derivation of generalized gravitational entropy associated to co-dimension 2 'entangling' hypersurfaces is given. The approach is similar to the Jacobson-Myers 'Hamiltonian' method and it does not require computations on manifolds with conical singularities. It is demonstrated that the entangling surfaces should be extrema of the entropy functional. When our approach is applied to Lovelock theories of gravity the generalized entropy formula coincides with results derived by other methods.