Sunday, June 1, 2014

general relativity - GR as a gauge theory: there's a Lorentz-valued spin connection, but what about a translation-valued connection?


Given an internal symmetry group, we gauge it by promoting the exterior derivative to its covariant version:


D=d+A,


where A=AaTa is a Lie algebra valued one-form known as the connection (or gauge field) and T the algebra generators.


For GR, we would like to do the same thing with the Poincaré group. But the Poincaré group isn't simple, but rather splits into translations P and Lorentz transformations J. I would thus expect two species of connections:



D=d+BaPa+AabJab.


But the covariant derivative of GR as usually found in textbooks is:


μ=μ+12(ωαβ)μJαβ,


where ω is the spin connection. It is defined for any object that has a defined transformation under J, i.e., under Lorentz transformations, like spinors or tensors. But it makes no mention of the translation generator P. What happened? Shouldn't I have this extra gauge field?




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