Numerical Relativity: Components of the Lapse Function?

[Wallace]

I have a technical question about numerical relativity, hopefully someone can help.

In the usual 3 + 1 decomposition in NR, the four gauge freedoms are expressed via the lapse, \alpha and three shift components \beta^i. In a finite element numerical scheme, each grid point will have a value for these 4 components.

Now, looking at evolution equations on the other hand, I see terms that want to take the covariant derivative of the lapse function, which I can't understand since it is a scalar, and hence the covariant derivative reduces to the regular derivative.

To be explicit, take for instance the ADM evolution equation for the extrinsic curvature. The textbook I have ("Elements of Numerical Relativity" by Carles Bona and Carlos Palenzuela-Luque), write this down as

(\partial_t - L_{\beta} ) K_{ij} = -\alpha_{j;i} + \alpha [ ...]

I've left the rest of the equation out for simplicity (note that L_{\beta} is the Lie Derivative, I couldn't work out how to make the nice curly L with the tex tags). See that both \alpha and \alpha^i appear which I don't understand. It would make sense if this book was using \alpha^i to denote the shift vector, but as you can see from the LHS (and it made clear in the book) it uses \beta^i for this.

Any ideas? I'm just replacing the Covariant derivative with the regular one for \alpha but maybe the equation is actually telling me something very different?

 

[Wallace]

I think I found the answer, comparing to other literature it looks like they were meaning

\alpha_i \equiv \partial_i \alpha

that makes sense, because the covariant derivative of that would not be 'trivial', i.e. reduce simply to the regular derivative.