Intersecting hypersurfaces in dimensionally continued topological density gravitation

We consider intersecting hypersurfaces in curved spacetime with gravity governed by a class of actions which are topological invariants in lower dimensionality. Along with the Chern-Simons boundary terms there is a sequence of intersection terms that should be added in the action functional for a well defined variational principle. We construct them in the case of Characteristic Classes, obtaining relations which have a general topological meaning. Applying them on a manifold with a discontinuous connection 1-form we obtain the gravity action functional of the system and show that the junction conditions can be found in a simple algebraic way. At the sequence of intersections there are localized independent energy tensors, constrained only by energy conservation. We work out explicitly the simplest nontrivial case. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.