Covariant Hamilton-Jacobi Equation for Pure Gravity

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to provide access to a previously unpublished and nearly lost paper: P. Hořava, "Covariant Hamilton-Jacobi Equation for Pure Gravity", which appeared originally in July 1990 as a Prague Preprint PRA-HEP-90/4, at the Institute of Physics, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, but appears otherwise unavailable online. The author has recently acquired an original copy of this preprint; the present article contains a verbatim transcript of the original 1990 paper, framed by a small number of comments. The contents of the 1990 paper was based on the results contained in the author's BSc Thesis, written in Czech, and presented at Charles University, Prague, in 1986. The original 1990 Abstract: We present an alternative framework for treating Einstein gravity in any dimension greater than two, and at any signature. It is based on a covariant Hamilton-Jacobi-De~Donder equation, which is proved to be equivalent to the Lagrange theory, on space-times of arbitrary topology. It in particular means that Einstein gravity can be thought of as a (covariantly) regular system. Finally, the Hamilton-Jacobi theory is studied, and it is shown that any solution of Einstein equations can be obtained from the action form equal identically to zero.