Clifford Bundle - Clifford Bundle of A Riemannian Manifold

Clifford Bundle of A Riemannian Manifold

If M is a Riemannian manifold with metric g, then the Clifford bundle of M is the Clifford bundle generated by the tangent bundle TM. One can also build a Clifford bundle out of the cotangent bundle T*M. The metric induces a natural isomorphism TM = T*M and therefore an isomorphism Cℓ(TM) = Cℓ(T*M).

There is a natural vector bundle isomorphism between the Clifford bundle of M and the exterior bundle of M:

This is an isomorphism of vector bundles not algebra bundles. The isomorphism is induced from the corresponding isomorphism on each fiber. In this way one can think of sections of the Clifford bundle as differential forms on M equipped with Clifford multiplication rather than the wedge product (which is independent of the metric).

The above isomorphism respects the grading in the sense that

$\begin{align} C\ell^0(T^*M) &= \Lambda^{\mathrm{even}}(T^*M)\\ C\ell^1(T^*M) &= \Lambda^{\mathrm{odd}}(T^*M). \end{align}$

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