Sunday, April 5, 2015

homework and exercises - Derivation of Christoffel Symbols


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,ννeμ, can be written as a linear combination of these basis vectors and also a normal vector, i.e. eμ,ν=Γλμνeλ+Kμνn



I also know that the metric itself, gμν can be written as the dot product of these basic vectors as gμν=eμeν


So my logic was to take the derivative of the metric with this definition:


αgμν=α(eμeν)=αeμeν+eμαeν=eμ,αeν+eμeν,α=(Γλμαeλ+Kμαn)eν+eμ(Γλναeλ+Kναn)=Γλμα(eλeν)+Γλνα(eμeλ)=Γλμαgλν+Γλναgμλ=Γλμαgλν+Γλναgλμ


In this, the only thing I used was that neλ=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:


gαλαgμν=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:


gαλαgμν=Γλμν+Γλνμ


And lastly the Christoffel symbols are symmetric in their lower two indices so we finally get:


gαλαgμν=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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