English

A formalism for the calculus of variations with spinors

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-01-14 v2 Differential Geometry

Abstract

We develop a frame and dyad gauge-independent formalism for the calculus of variations of functionals involving spinorial objects. As part of this formalism we define a modified variation operator which absorbs frame and spin dyad gauge terms. This formalism is applicable to both the standard spacetime (i.e. SL(2,C)) 2-spinors as well as to space (i.e. SU(2,C)) 2-spinors. We compute expressions for the variations of the connection and the curvature spinors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.03770,
  title  = {A formalism for the calculus of variations with spinors},
  author = {Thomas Bäckdahl and Juan A. Valiente Kroon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.03770},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

18 pages. Added diffeomorphism dependence