Saturday, 5 September 2009

dg.differential geometry - Tetrad postulate: Implies or results from the metricity of the connection?

Having botched the first attempt at answering this question and not wanting to delete the evidence, let me try again here.



The "tetrad postulate" is independent from metricity and from the condition that the connection be torsion-free. It is simply the equivalence (via the vielbein) of two connections on two different bundles. Here are the details. M is a smooth n-dimensional manifold.



First of all we have an affine connection nabla on TM with connection coefficients Gammarhomunu relative to a coordinate basis -- that is,
nablapartialmupartialnu=Gammarmunuhopartialrho,


with partialmu an abbreviation for partial/partialxmu where xmu is a local chart on M.



Then we have a connection on an associated vector bundle to the frame bundle PmathrmGL(M). The frame bundle is a principal mathrmGL(n)-bundle and given any representation rho:mathrmGL(n)tomathrmGL(V) of mathrmGL(n) we can define a vector bundle
PmathrmGL(M)timesrhoV.


Take V to be the defining n-dimensional representation and call the resulting bundle E. Relative to a local frame ea for E, a connection hatnabla defines connection one-form omega by
hatnablapartialmuea=omegabmu aeb.



Now the vielbein defines a bundle isomorphism TMbuildrelcongoverlongrightarrowE and all the "tetrad postulate" says is that the two connections nabla and hatnabla correspond. In fact, the "tetrad postulate" is just the statement that the vielbein is a parallel section of the bundle TMotimesE relative to the tensor product connection.



This works for any affine connection nabla on any smooth manifold M. No metric is involved.



A special case of this construction is when (M,g) is a riemannian manifold and nabla is the Levi-Civita connection (i.e., the unique torsion-free, metric connection on TM).
You can without loss of generality restrict to orthonormal frames, which defines a principal mathrmO(n) (or mathrmO(p,q) depending on signature) bundle. The representation V restricts to an irreducible rep of the orthogonal group, possessing an invariant bilinear form eta. This relates g and eta as in your question.

1 comment:

  1. I cannot even see anything on the page because of the background

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