Homegr-qcarXiv:2605.30221

Primary Constraints of Newer General Relativity

gr-qchep-th2026-05v1license

Abstract

We study the primary constraint structure of Newer General Relativity, a gravity theory based on a torsionless teleparallel geometry. The gravitational action is built from a scalar formed by quadratic combinations of the nonmetricity tensor, with arbitrary coefficients cic_i in the Lagrangian. We decompose the Lagrangian and compute the canonical momenta conjugate to the metric. We characterize the primary constraints arising from these momenta by identifying when the map between velocities and momenta becomes non-invertible, and organize the outcome through a fully nonlinear decomposition into scalar, vector and tensor sectors. Comparing with previous results in the literature, we recover five and three primary constraints associated with the tensor and vector sectors, respectively. We also identify a previously unreported degeneracy in the scalar sector, which yields either one or two scalar primary constraints depending on the conditions imposed on the parameters cic_i. Finally, we obtain the primary constraints associated with the covariant formulation of symmetric teleparallel gravity.

Comments: 33 pages, 1 table, no figures; comments welcome

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.30221,
  title  = {Primary Constraints of Newer General Relativity},
  author = {Carmen Ferrara and Alexey Golovnev and María José Guzmán},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30221},
  year   = {2026}
}