Conserved charges, surface degrees of freedom, and black hole entropy

Understand

In this thesis, we study the Hamiltonian and covariant phase space description of gravitational theories.

• The phase space represents the allowed field configurations and is accompanied by a closed nondegenerate 2 form- the symplectic form.
• We will show that local/gauge symmetries of the action fall into two different categories in the phase space formulation.
• Those corresponding to constraints in the phase space, and those associated with nontrivial conserved charges.