Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-23-2023

Publication Title

Journal of High Energy Physics

Volume

2023

Issue

154

Pages

1-47

Publisher Name

Springer Nature

Abstract

Constructing charges in the covariant phase space formalism often leads to formally divergent expressions, even when the fields satisfy physically acceptable fall-off conditions. These expressions can be rendered finite by corner ambiguities in the definition of the presymplectic potential, which in some cases may be motivated by arguments involving boundary Lagrangians. We show that the necessary corner terms are already present in the variation of the bulk action and can be extracted in a straightforward way. Once these corner terms are included in the presymplectic potential, charges derived from an associated codimension-2 form are automatically finite. We illustrate the procedure with examples in two and three dimensions, working in Bondi gauge and obtaining integrable charges. As a by-product, actions are derived for these theories that admit a well-defined variational principle when the fields satisfy boundary conditions on a timelike surface with corners. An interesting feature of our analysis is that the fields are not required to be fully on-shell.

Comments

Author Posting © The Authors, 2023. This article was published open access in the Journal of High Energy Physics, Volume 2023, Number 154, August 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP08(2023)154

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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