For field theories that include the abelian gauge field A,,,,, the field equations allow an arbitrary integration constant, which does not appear in the lagrangian but which does affect the physics. We present two applications: (i) the tJ parameter of effective lagrangians for chiral symmetry breaking in QCD, and (ii) the cosmological constant in N = 8 supergravity, which does not require a gauging of the O(8) symmetry, but is rather due to a spontaneous breakdown of supersymmetry.

Following a minisuperspace approach to the dynamics of a spherically symmetric shell, a reduced Lagrangian for the radial degree of freedom is derived directly from the Einstein-Hilbert action. The key feature of this new Lagrangian is its invariance under time reparametrization. Indeed, all classical and quantum dynamics is encoded in the Hamiltonian constraint that follows from that invariance. Thus, at the classical level, we show that the Hamiltonian constraint reproduces, in a simple gauge, Israel's matching condition *

We borrow the minisuperspace approximation from quantum cosmology and the quenching approximation from QCD in order to derive a new form of the bosonic p-brane propagator. In this new approximation we obtain an exact description of both the collective mode deformation of the brane and the center of mass dynamics in the target space time. The collective mode dynamics is a generalization of string dynamics in terms of area variables. The final result is that the evolution of a p-brane in the quenched-minisuperspace approximation is formally equivalent to the effective motion of a particle in a spacetime where points as well as hypersurfaces are considered on the same footing as fundamental geometrical objects. This geometric equivalence leads us to define a new tension-shell condition that is a direct extension of the Klein-Gordon condition for material particles to the case of a physical p-brane.

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