Unified formalism for Palatini gravity

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified geometric formalism for Palatini and unimodular gravity, incorporating metricity conditions and equations of motion invariantly using jet bundle forms, advancing the theoretical understanding of these gravity models.

Contribution

It introduces a geometric unified formalism for Palatini and unimodular gravity using jet bundle forms, providing invariant equations of motion and a reduction approach for unimodular gravity.

Findings

Invariant formulation of Palatini gravity equations

Unified geometric approach for Palatini and unimodular gravity

Proof of involutivity of the equations of motion

Abstract

The present article is devoted to the construction of a unified formalism for Palatini and unimodular gravity. The basic idea is to employ a relationship between unified formalism for a Griffiths variational problem and its classical Lepage-equivalent variational problem. As a way to understand from an intuitive viewpoint the Griffiths variational problem approach considered here, we may say the variations of the Palatini Lagrangian are performed in such a way that the so called metricity condition, i.e. (part of) the condition ensuring that the connection is the Levi-Civita connection for the metric specified by the vielbein, is preserved. From the same perspective, the classical Lepage-equivalent problem is a geometrical implementation of the Lagrange multipliers trick, so that the metricity condition is incorporated directly into the Palatini Lagrangian. The main geometrical tools involved in these constructions are canonical forms living on the first jet of the frame bundle for the spacetime manifold $M$. These forms play an essential r\^ole in providing a global version of the Palatini Lagrangian and expressing the metricity condition in an invariant form; with their help, it was possible to formulate an unified formalism for Palatini gravity in a geometrical fashion. Moreover, we were also able to find the associated equations of motion in invariant terms and, by using previous results from the literature, to prove their involutivity. As a bonus, we showed how this construction can be used to provide a unified formalism for the so called unimodular gravity by employing a reduction of the structure group of the principal bundle $LM$ to the special linear group $SL\left(m\right),m=\mathop{\text{dim}}{M}$.