Spin Structure - Spin Structures On Vector Bundles

Spin Structures On Vector Bundles

Let M be a paracompact topological manifold and E an oriented vector bundle on M of dimension n equipped with a fibre metric. This means that at each point of M, the fibre of E is an inner product space. A spinor bundle of E is a prescription for consistently associating a spin representation to every point of M. There are topological obstructions to being able to do it, and consequently, a given bundle E may not admit any spinor bundle. In case it does, one says that the bundle E is spin.

This may be made rigorous through the language of principal bundles. The collection of oriented orthonormal frames of a vector bundle form a frame bundle P_SO(E), which is a principal bundle under the action of the special orthogonal group SO(n). A spin structure for P_SO(E) is a lift of P_SO(E) to a principal bundle P_Spin(E) under the action of the spin group Spin(n), by which we mean that there exists a bundle map φ : P_Spin(E) → P_SO(E) such that

, for all p ∈ P_Spin(E) and g ∈ Spin(n),

where ρ: Spin(n) → SO(n) is the mapping of groups presenting the spin group as a double-cover of SO(n).

In the special case in which E is the tangent bundle TM over the base manifold M, if a spin structure exists then one says that M is a spin manifold. Equivalently M is spin if the SO(n) principal bundle of orthonormal bases of the tangent fibers of M is a Z₂ quotient of a principal spin bundle.

If the manifold has a cell decomposition or a triangulation, a spin structure can equivalently be thought of as a homotopy-class of trivialization of the tangent bundle over the 1-skeleton that extends over the 2-skeleton. If the dimension is lower than 3, one first takes a Whitney sum with a trivial line bundle.