Gravitational energy-momentum and the Hamiltonian formulation of the teleparallel gravity

A brief discussion is made about the relevance of surface terms in the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of theories of gravity. These surface terms play an important role in the variation of the action integral and in the definition of field quantities such as the gravitational energy-momentum. Then we point out several inconsistencies of a recently proposed formulation of teleparallel theories of gravity with local Lorentz symmetry.

We investigate the conservation law of energy-momentum in teleparallel gravity by using general Noether theorem. The energy-momentum current has also superpotential and is therefore identically conserved. The total energy-momentum, which includes the contributions of both matter and gravitational fields, is given by the integral of scalar densities over a three-dimensional spacelike hypersurface. As an example, the universe in teleparallel gravity is investigated. It is shown...

We present a new Hamiltonian formulation of the Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR) meant to serve as the departure point for canonical quantization of the theory. TEGR is considered here as a theory of a cotetrad field on a spacetime. The Hamiltonian formulation is derived by means of an ADM-like 3+1 decomposition of the field and without any gauge fixing. A complete set of constraints on the phase space and their algebra are presented. The formulation is de...

The obstruction for the existence of an energy momentum tensor for the gravitational field is connected with differential-geometric features of the Riemannian manifold. It has not to be valid for alternative geometrical structures. A teleparallel manifold is defined as a parallelizable differentiable 4D-manifold endowed with a class of smooth coframe fields related by global Lorentz, i.e., SO(1,3) transformations. In this article a general free parametric class of teleparalle...

The Hamiltonian formulation of the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity (TEGR) is developed from an ordinary second-order Lagrangian, which is written as a quadratic form of the coefficients of anholonomy of the orthonormal frames (vielbeins). We analyze the structure of eigenvalues of the multi-index matrix entering the (linear) relation between canonical velocities and momenta to obtain the set of primary constraints. The canonical Hamiltonian is then built with th...

This paper elaborates the problem of energy-momentum in the framework of teleparallel equivalent of General Relativity. For this purpose, we consider energy-momentum prescription derived from the integral form of the constraint equations developed in the Hamiltonian formulation of the teleparallel equivalent of General Relativity. We use this technique to investigate energy-momentum of stationary axisymmetric Einstein-Maxwell solutions and cosmic string spacetimes. The angula...

Using the Dirac procedure to treat constraints dynamical sistems applied to gravitation, as described in the context of Teleparallel Equivalent of General Relativity (TEGR), we investigate, from the first class constraints, the gauge transformations in the fundamental field: the components of tetrads. We have shown that there is no an isotropy in physical space with respect to gauge transformations, i.e., given an arbitrary gravitational field, coming from a gauge transformat...

We review different approaches to the Hamiltonian analysis of teleparallel theories of gravity. In particular the Hamiltonian analysis for $f(\mathbb{T})$ theories led to disputed results in the literature. The aim of this review is to relate the different notations and assumptions in the different approaches in a comprehensive way, so that they can be compared more easily. To do this we present the primary constraints of the $f({\mathbb{T}_{\textrm{NGR}}})$ gravity class of ...

The covariant formulation of teleparallel gravity theories must include the spin connection, which has 6 degrees of freedom. One can, however, always choose a gauge such that the spin connection is put to zero. In principle this gauge may affect counting of degrees of freedom in the Hamiltonian analysis. We show for general teleparallel theories of gravity, that fixing the gauge such that the spin connection vanishes in fact does not affect the counting of degrees of freedom....

An axiomatization of the so-called Teleparallel Equivalent to General Relativity is presented. A set of formal and semantic postulates are elaborated from where the physical meaning of various key concepts of the theory are clarified. These concepts include those of inertia, Lorentz and diffeomorphism invariance, and reference frame. It is shown that Teleparallel Gravity admits a wider representation of space-time than General Relativity, allowing to define properties of the ...