Gibbons-Hawking Boundary Terms and Junction Conditions for Higher-Order Brane Gravity Models

We derive the most general junction conditions for the fourth-order brane gravity constructed of arbitrary functions of curvature invariants. We reduce these fourth-order theories to second order theories at the expense of introducing new scalar and tensor fields - the scalaron and the tensoron. In order to obtain junction conditions we apply the method of generalized Gibbons-Hawking boundary terms which are appended to the appropriate actions. After assuming the continuity of the scalaron and the tensoron on the brane, we recover junction conditions for such general brane universe models previously obtained by different methods. The derived junction conditions can serve studying the cosmological implications of the higher-order brane gravity models.