So I am reading a book on relativity & differential geometry and in the text, they gave the Christoffel symbols in terms of the metric and its derivatives, but I wanted to derive it myself. However, when I derived it, I seem to be missing two terms. Can somebody spot where I messed up?
From the text, they said that the derivative of the basis vectors →eμ, denoted as →eμ,ν≡∂ν→eμ, can be written as a linear combination of these basis vectors and also a normal vector, i.e. →eμ,ν=Γλμν→eλ+Kμν→n
I also know that the metric itself, gμν can be written as the dot product of these basic vectors as gμν=→eμ⋅→eν
So my logic was to take the derivative of the metric with this definition:
∂αgμν=∂α(→eμ⋅→eν)=∂α→eμ⋅→eν+→eμ⋅∂α→eν=→eμ,α⋅→eν+→eμ⋅→eν,α=(Γλμα→eλ+Kμα→n)⋅→eν+→eμ⋅(Γλνα→eλ+Kνα→n)=Γλμα(→eλ⋅→eν)+Γλνα(→eμ⋅→eλ)=Γλμαgλν+Γλναgμλ=Γλμαgλν+Γλναgλμ
In this, the only thing I used was that →n⋅→eλ=0 by definition and that the metric is symmetric, i.e. gμλ=gλμ.
So now that I have that equation for the derivative of the metric, I might as well play around with it and solve for the Christoffel symbols. The only thing I did was multiply the whole equation by gαλ in an attempt to contract and eliminate some of the metric terms to isolate Γ:
gαλ∂αgμν=Γλμαgαλgλν+Γλναgαλgλν=Γλμαδαν+Γλναδαμ
Since this is just multiplying the metric by its inverse, it results in the identity matrix, or the Kronecker delta. Since this is 0 when the indices are not equal to each other and 1 when they are, we can write this as:
gαλ∂αgμν=Γλμν+Γλνμ
And lastly the Christoffel symbols are symmetric in their lower two indices so we finally get:
gαλ∂αgμν=2Γλμν or Γλμν=12gαλ(∂αgμν)
The problem is that the actual (correct) answer for Γ involves three derivatives of the metric instead of my one. Where have I gone wrong here?
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