We revisit the action principle for general relativity, motivated by the path integral approach to quantum gravity. We consider a spacetime region whose boundary has piecewise C 2 components, each of which can be spacelike, timelike or null and consider metric variations in which only the pullback of the metric to the boundary is held fixed. Allowing all such metric variations we present a unified treatment of the spacelike, timelike and null boundary components using Cartan's tetrad formalism. Apart from its computational simplicity, this formalism gives us a simple way of identifying corner terms. We also discuss "creases" which occur when the boundary is the event horizon of a black hole. Our treatment is geometric and intrinsic and we present our results both in the computationally simpler tetrad formalism as well as the more familiar metric formalism. We recover known results from a simpler and more general point of view and find some new ones. arXiv:1612.00149v2 [gr-qc] 1 Feb 2017

We propose a family of boundary terms for the action of a causal set with a spacelike boundary. We show that in the continuum limit one recovers the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term in the mean. We also calculate the continuum limit of the mean causal set action for an Alexandrov interval in flat spacetime. We find that it is equal to the volume of the codimension-2 intersection of the two light-cone boundaries of the interval. 1 arXiv:1502.05388v2 [gr-qc]

We introduce a convolution on a 2-sphere and use it to show that the linearised Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin transformations and gauge fixing conditions of Einstein-Hilbert gravity coupled to a two-form and a scalar field, follow from the product of two Yang-Mills theories. This provides an example of the convolutive product of gauge theories on a nontrivial background. By introducing a time direction the product is shown to extend to the D = 1 + 2 Einstein-static universe.

It is by now well-recognised that the naïve application of the projection postulate on composite quantum systems can induce signalling between their constituent components, indicative of a breakdown of causality in a relativistic spacetime context. Here we introduce a necessary and sufficient condition for a measurement of an observable on a composite system to be non-signalling. As well as being particularly simple, it generalises previous no-signalling conditions in that it allows for degeneracies and can be applied to all bounded self-adjoint operators. The condition is used to establish that arbitrary sums of local observables will not signal, in accordance with our expectations from relativistic quantum field theory. On the other hand, it is shown that the measurement of the tensor product of commuting local observables, for example bipartite operators of the form A ⊗ B, will in fact signal, contrary to the widely-held belief that such measurements are always locally realisable. The implications for the notion of measurement in relativistic quantum field theory are addressed; it appears that the most straightforward application of the standard quantum formalism generically leads to violations of causality. We conclude that either the class of observables that can be measured should be severely restricted and/or that the naïve translation of the measurement framework of quantum theory, in particular the projection postulate, to quantum field theory must be re-evaluated.

A quantum scalar field in a patch of a fixed, topology-changing, 1 + 1 dimensional "trousers" spacetime is studied using the Sorkin-Johnston formalism. The isometry group of the patch is the dihedral group, the symmetry group of the square. The theory is shown to be pathological in a way that can be interpreted as the topology change giving rise to a divergent energy, in agreement with previous results. In contrast to previous results, it is shown that the infinite energy is localised not only on the future light cone of the topology changing singularity, but also on the past cone, due to the time reversal symmetry of the Sorkin-Johnston state.arXiv:1609.03573v2 [gr-qc]