
Boundary terms in cosmology
In the derivation of the Einstein field equations via Hamilton's principle, the inclusion of a boundary term is essential to render the variational problem well-posed, as it addresses variations that do not vanish at the boundary of the spacetime manifold. Typically, this term is chosen as the Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term. In this work, we propose an alternative treatment of the boundary term within a cosmological framework by employing the Lagrange multiplier method. This approach enforc…