Gauging Poincare to obtain Einstein gravity

haushofer
Science Advisor
Insights Author
Messages
3,045
Reaction score
1,579
Hi,

I'm rather confused about the procedure in which people obtain gravity from gauged (super)-Poincare algebras. Let me outline what this procedure is.

*First you gauge the Poincare algebra with generators P and M
*You obtain two gauge fields: the vielbein (associated with P) and the spin connection (associated with M)
*After that you put the curvature of P, called R(P), to zero: R(P)=0

Now, this R(P)=0 constraint has two effects:

1) The spin connection becomes a dependent field; the number of constraints equals the number of components of the spin connection, and thus it can be solved

2) One can "exchange" the P-transformations for general coordinate transformations (gct's), which is what you want: in a theory of gravity there are no P-transformations, but just gct's and local Lorentz transformations (GR can as such be defined on a tangent bundle with these two transformations as right- and left transformations)

However, this second step is not clear to me. Gauging the Poincare algebra is done a la Yang-Mills, so the algebra is realized on the gauge fields. So the parameter of the P-transformations is NOT a vector lying in the tangent space, right? It's just an internal parameter. However, in the end you want the Local Lorentz transformations to act in the tangent space, so where do you make this identification?

Also, this exchanging of the P-transformations, which is often described in texts about supergravity, is not clear to me. The relation in the Poincare case says that

<br /> \xi^{\lambda}\partial_{\lambda}e_{\mu}^a + \partial_{\mu}\xi^{\lambda}e_{\lambda}^a = \xi^{\lambda}R_{\lambda\mu}^a (P) + \delta_{P}(\xi^{\lambda}e_{\lambda}^b)e_{\mu}^a + \delta_M(\xi^{\lambda}\omega_{\lambda}^{ef})e_{\mu}^a<br />

The LHS is a gct, and so we see that putting R(P)=0 we get a relation between gct's, P-transformations with a gauge parameter involving the vielbein, and a local Lorentz transformation involving the spin connection. However, these are NOT the usual gauge transformations, so how is this "exchange" precisely done?

Also, obviously you change the gauge algebra, and is it guaranteed that it will still close on the fields?

Thanks in forward!
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Einstein, and most modern scientists, prefer Lorentzian transforms. Poincaire relies more on semi-classical approaches - which are less robust in quantum treatments.
 
I'm not talking about making things quantum mechanically; I just want a thorough prescription how you obtain GR from the gauged Poincare algebra, and step (2) in my first post is my main obstacle :)

I'm not sure what you mean to say.

The subtlety lies in the fact that you're gauging Poincare in the Yang-Mills way and treat the parameters as lying in some internal space, while in the end ofcourse you want to make an identification to "external transformations" (by which I mean spacetime transformations!), namely gct's.

Ofcourse, you could be just pragmatic, but I have the feeling something fishy is going on here.
 
OK, so this has bugged me for a while about the equivalence principle and the black hole information paradox. If black holes "evaporate" via Hawking radiation, then they cannot exist forever. So, from my external perspective, watching the person fall in, they slow down, freeze, and redshift to "nothing," but never cross the event horizon. Does the equivalence principle say my perspective is valid? If it does, is it possible that that person really never crossed the event horizon? The...
In this video I can see a person walking around lines of curvature on a sphere with an arrow strapped to his waist. His task is to keep the arrow pointed in the same direction How does he do this ? Does he use a reference point like the stars? (that only move very slowly) If that is how he keeps the arrow pointing in the same direction, is that equivalent to saying that he orients the arrow wrt the 3d space that the sphere is embedded in? So ,although one refers to intrinsic curvature...
So, to calculate a proper time of a worldline in SR using an inertial frame is quite easy. But I struggled a bit using a "rotating frame metric" and now I'm not sure whether I'll do it right. Couls someone point me in the right direction? "What have you tried?" Well, trying to help truly absolute layppl with some variation of a "Circular Twin Paradox" not using an inertial frame of reference for whatevere reason. I thought it would be a bit of a challenge so I made a derivation or...
Back
Top