Cartan Formalism (physics) - The Palatini Action

The Palatini Action

In the tetrad formulation of general relativity, the action, as a functional of the cotetrad e and a connection form A over a four-dimensional differential manifold M is given by

where F is the gauge curvature 2-form and ε is the antisymmetric intertwiner of four "vector" reps of SO(3,1) normalized by η.

Note that in the presence of spinor fields, the Palatini action implies that dAe is nonzero, that is, have torsion. See Einstein-Cartan theory.

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