Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Action Principle in General Relativity

Thanu Padmanabhan

IUCAA

I will describe several peculiar features of gravitational action principle, mainly concentrating on Einstein's Hilbert Action. Part of the lecture will be pedagogical and self-contained requiring only a background in GR at the level of a standard graduate course. I will also comment on several subtleties which are often overlooked or even mishandled in the literature. This part will be of interest to the researchers working in GR / QFT etc. as well.