Comments on Joint Terms in Gravitational Action

Abstract

This paper compares three different methods about computing joint terms in on-shell action of gravity, which are identifying the joint term by the variational principle in Dirichlet boundary condition, treating the joint term as the limit contribution of smooth boundary and finding the joint term by local SO(1,$d-1$) transformation. In general metric gravitational theory, we show that the differences between these joint terms are some variational invariants under fixed boundary condition. We also give an explicit condition to judge the existence of joint term determined by variational principle and apply it into general relativity as an example.