Sunday, July 6, 2014

general relativity - Is Einstein-Hilbert action the unique action whose variation gives Einstein's field equations?


I know that




  1. scaling the action with a non-zero multiplicative constant, or




  2. adding a total divergence term to the Lagrangian density





do not change the Euler-Lagrange equations, cf. e.g. this Phys.SE post.


Apart from such trivial modifications (1&2), is Einstein-Hilbert action the unique action whose variation gives Einstein's field equations? If not, is there any other action known which differs non-trivially from Einstein-Hilbert action and whose variation gives Einstein's equations?




No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...