# References

Reply to the comment by Park and Ho   
S. Carlip<sup>*</sup><sup>*</sup>*email: carlip@dirac.ucdavis.edu   
Department of Physics   
University of California   
Davis, CA 95616   
USA

Park and Ho  correctly point out an error in the surface term (9) of Ref. , and the consequent lack of antisymmetry in the Poisson brackets (13) of that paper. The root of the problem is that the surface term fails to make the action sufficiently “differentiable”: the diffeomorphisms of interest, given by eqns. (17)-(18) of Ref. , do not satisfy the boundary conditions (described after eqn. (10)) needed in order for the total surface term in the variation of the action to vanish. An interesting alternative has been proposed by Sovoliev , who suggests an approach to boundary terms that does not require “differentiability” of the action, but it is not clear to me whether this completely resolves the problem.

Despite this error, however, the overall conclusion of Ref.  remains valid. The relevant surface terms have been analyzed more thoroughly, in a manifestly covariant manner, in Ref. , where it is shown that the Virasoro algebra of Ref.  is reproduced with the correct values of central charge and $`L_0`$ needed to explain black hole entropy. The details of the relation between the covariant phase space approach of Ref.  and the canonical approach of Ref.  have not yet been worked out, however. Moreover, as Ref.  demonstrates, there are still unanswered questions concerning the proper generic boundary conditions for a black hole horizon, so the subject cannot be considered closed.

While the the error pointed out by Park and Ho is a real one, their analysis is slightly misleading in one respect. Their criticism (b) implicitly assumes that because a nonrotating black hole has no preferred angular direction, diffeomorphisms like those of eqn. (18) of Ref.  should be taken to be independent of angular coordinates. But as observed in Ref. , the generator of diffeomorphisms (with the correct boundary terms) exists only when an angular dependence is included. For a static black hole, this angular dependence is nearly arbitrary—different choices lead to isomorphic Virasoro algebras—but it cannot be neglected. As a result, criticism (b) is not valid.

The Comment by Park and Ho also raises an interesting issue that deserves to be investigated further. Their “anomalous boundary contribution” to the transformation of, for example, $`g_{rr}`$ is determined by looking at the variation $`\delta L[\xi ]`$ of the generator of diffeomorphisms and extracting the coefficient of $`\delta \pi ^{rr}`$. This certainly seems to be a valid procedure. On the other hand, however, the relevant variation $`\delta L[\xi ]`$ is

$$\delta L[\xi ]_{r=r_+}\frac{1}{f}n_r\widehat{\xi }^rg_{rr}\delta \pi ^{rr},\text{with}\pi ^{rr}=\frac{1}{f}\sqrt{\sigma }\sigma ^{\alpha \beta }K_{\alpha \beta }.$$
(1)   
If one uses the boundary conditions (3) and (4) of Ref. , one finds that this variation vanishes. Park and Ho obtain a nonzero contribution to $`\delta g_{rr}`$ because they divide $`\delta L[\xi ]`$, which vanishes at $`r=r_+`$, by $`\delta \pi ^{rr}`$, which also vanishes.

Now, in the standard approach of Regge and Teitelboim  to surface terms and ADM mass, one computes the variation $`\delta L[\xi ]`$, takes an appropriate limit to go to a boundary such as spatial infinity, and then uses the limiting variation to determine a boundary term. What Park and Ho have demonstrated is that this process does not necessarily “commute” with the process of functionally differentiating to obtain Poisson brackets. It may be that this paradox can be resolved by correctly incorporating boundary conditions into the definition of Dirac brackets, but further investigation seems warranted.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Department of Energy grant DE-FG03-91ER40674.