Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2020
This is the first central Chapter of the book that describes Riemannian geometry using Cartan's notion of soldering. Gravity first appears in this Chapter as a dynamical theory of a collection of differential forms rather than a metric. We describe thegeneral notion of geometric structures and then specialise to the case of a geometric structure corresponding to a metric. We describe the notion of a spin connection, its torsion, and then present examples of caclulations of Riemann curvature in the tetrad formalism. We then describe the Einstein-Cartan formulation of GR in terms of differential forms, and present its teleparallel version. We introduce the idea of the pure connection formulation, and compute the corresponding actino perturbatively. We then describe theso-called MacDowell-Mansouri formulation. We briefly describe the computations necessary to carry out the dimensional reduction from 5D to 4D. We then describe the so-called BF formulation of 4D GR, which in particular allows to determine the pure connection action in a closed form. We then describe the field redefinitions that are available when one works in BF formalism, and the associated formulation of BF-type plus potential for the B field.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.