The vielbein formalism

Low Zhen Lin February 26, 2011

Denition 1. A vielbein, or frame eld, is a set of vector elds ea dened on a smooth (pseudo-)Riemannian manifold such that g(ea , eb ) = ab , where g is the metric tensor and is a constant non-degenerate diagonal matrix with 1 on the diagonal. We will use the convention where Latin indices refer to components with respect to the vielbein basis, and Greek indices refer to components with respect to the coordinate basis. Proposition 2. Let ea be the components of ea with respect to the coordinate basis . Let ea be the components of with respect to the vielbein basis ea . Then, we have,

ea eb = b a

ec ec =

(1)

Denition 3. The commutation coecients Cabc of a vielbein are the components of the commutator [ea , eb ] = ea eb eb ea , with respect to the vielbein basis, i.e. [ea , eb ] = Cabc ec. Proposition 4. Let f, = f denote the partial derivative of f with respect to the -th coordinate. Then, ) ( c (2) Cab = ea eb , eb ea , ec Lemma 5. By dierentiating the equations in the conclusion of proposition2,we obtain the identities

Moreover, this is independent of the orthonormality condition.

ea , eb + ea eb, = 0
and in particular

ec

c , e

+ ec ec, = 0

(3)

eb, = eb ec ec,

ea

= ea ec ec,

(4)

As with proposition 2, this is independent of the orthonormality condition. 1

Consider the quantity ec, ec,. We would like to express this in terms of some vielbein structure constants, so let us dene ( ) c c c ab = e , e , ea eb (5) Note that the quantity inside the brackets looks like a commutator of some kind. In fact, by lemma 5, we have the following remarkable identity: Proposition 6.

cab = Cabc

(6)

As with the preceding results, this is independent of the orthonormality condition. Having dened these structure constants and proven these identities, we can now move on to dening some geometric quantities in terms of them. We start by dening the vielbein analogue of the Christoel symbol. Denition 7. Let be a connection on the manifold. The connection coecients bca are dened to satisfy the equation
XY

= X ea (Y ) + ca X Y

a c

eb

(7)

where X = Xa ea and Y = Yb eb are arbitrary vector elds. Explicitly, the connection coecients are given by the following equation:
e a ec

= bca eb
is the metric connection.

(8)

Now, let us specialise to the case where

Proposition 8. Suppose bca are the connection coecients for the metric connection on the manifold. Then,

bca =
where

) ) 1( b 1( b C ca + Cbac Ccab = c a + abc bca 2 2

f

(9)

Cbca = bd af Cda

cba = bd af da

Here we have used the orthonormality condition of the vielbein basis.