Lovelock action with nonsmooth boundaries

Abstract

We examine the variational problem in Lovelock gravity when the boundary contains timelike and spacelike segments nonsmoothly glued. We show that two kinds of contributions have to be added to the action. The first one is associated to the presence of a boundary in every segment and it depends on intrinsic and extrinsic curvatures. We can think of this contribution as adding a total derivative to the usual surface term of Lovelock gravity. The second one appears in every joint between two segments and it involves the integral along the joint of the Jacobson-Myers entropy density weighted by the Lorentz boost parameter which relates the orthonormal frames in each segment. We argue that this term can be straightforwardly extended to the case of joints involving null boundaries. As an application, we compute the contribution of these terms to the complexity of global AdS in Lovelock gravity by using the "complexity = action" proposal and we identify possible universal terms for arbitrary values of the Lovelock couplings. We find that they depend on the charge $a^*$ controlling the holographic entanglement entropy and on a new constant that we characterize.