From Spinor Geometry to Complex General Relativity

The necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of $\alpha$-surfaces in complex space-time manifolds with nonvanishing torsion is derived. For these manifolds, Lie brackets of vector fields and spinor Ricci identities contain explicitly the effects of torsion. This leads to an integrability condition for $\alpha$-surfaces which does not involve just the self-dual Weyl spinor, as in complex general relativity, but also the torsion spinor, in a nonlinear way, and its c...

The two dimensional version of the Sen connection for spinors and tensors on spacelike 2-surfaces is constructed. A complex metric $\gamma_{AB}$ on the spin spaces is found which characterizes both the algebraic and extrinsic geometrical properties of the 2-surface $\$ $. The curvature of the two dimensional Sen operator $\Delta_e$ is the pull back to $\$ $ of the anti-self-dual part of the spacetime curvature while its `torsion' is a boost gauge invariant expression of the e...

This article explores the geometric algebra of Minkowski spacetime, and its relationship to the geometric algebra of Euclidean 4-space. Both of these geometric algebras are algebraically isomorphic to the 2x2 matrix algebra over Hamilton's famous quaternions, and provide a rich geometric framework for various important topics in mathematics and physics, including stereographic projection and spinors, and both spherical and hyperbolic geometry. In addition, by identifying the ...

We lift the recently proposed theories of higher-spin self-dual Yang-Mills (SDYM) and gravity (SDGR) to the twistor space. We find that the most natural room for the twistor formulation of these theories is not in the projective, but in the full twistor space, which is the total space of the spinor bundle over the 4-dimensional manifold. In the case of higher-spin extension of the SDYM we prove an analogue of the Ward theorem, and show that there is a one-to-one correspondenc...

We examine some of the subtleties inherent in formulating a theory of spinors on a manifold with a smooth degenerate metric. We concentrate on the case where the metric is singular on a hypersurface that partitions the manifold into Lorentzian and Euclidean domains. We introduce the notion of a complex spinor fibration to make precise the meaning of continuity of a spinor field and give an expression for the components of a local spinor connection that is valid in the absence...

These are notes of lectures given at the Third School of Theoretical Physics in Jijel (Algeria, September 2009). The subject of these notes is differential geometry, complex and quaternionic structures with applications to theoretical physics. Concerning the physical applications, they contain several aspects of Penrose transformation in the Riemannian context (Euclidean signature) and various formulations of the Yang-Mills and Einstein equations among which several are unusu...

A review of some facts concerning classical spacetime geometry is presented together with a description of the most elementary aspects of the two-component spinor formalisms of Infeld and van der Waerden. Special attention is concentrated upon the gauge characterization of the basic geometric objects borne by the formalisms. It is pointed out that spin-affine configurations are most naively defined by carrying out parallel displacements of null world vectors within the framew...

In the general relativity theory the basic ingredient to describe gravity is the geometry, which interacts with all forms of matter and energy, and as such, the metric could be interpreted as a true physical quantity. However the metric is not matter nor energy, but instead it is a new dynamical variable that Einstein introduced to describe gravity. In order to conciliate this approach to the more traditional ones, physicists have tried to describe the main ideas of GR in ter...

When spacetime is considered as a subspace of a wider complex spacetime manifold, there is a mismatch of the elementary linear representations of their symmetry groups, the real and complex Poincar\'{e} groups. In particular, no spinors are allowed for the complex case. When a spin$^{h}$ structure is implemented on principal bundles in complex spacetime, one is naturally led to an algebraic structure analogous to the one of the standard model.

The self-interaction spin-2 approach to general relativity (GR) has been extremely influential in the particle physics community. Leaving no doubt regarding its heuristic value, we argue that a view of the metric field of GR as nothing but a stand-in for a self-coupling field in flat spacetime runs into a dilemma: either the view is physically incomplete in so far as it requires recourse to GR after all, or it leads to an absurd multiplication of alternative viewpoints on GR ...