1. Introduction
In the 2-spinor formalism [
1,
2,
3] all tensors with spacetime indices can be transformed into spinors with twice the number of spinor indices, i.e., a rank-2 tensor is changed into a spinor with four spinor indices. In addition, if the tensor is antisymmetric and real, it can be represented by a sum of two spinors with two spinor indices, and they are complex conjugate of each other, which indicates that a rank-2 antisymmetric tensor is equivalent to a spinor with two spinor indices. The Riemann curvature tensor is a rank-4 real tensor which describes gravitational fields and it has two antisymmetric characters. This means that the gravity can be described by two spinors with four spinor indices. Those two spinors are called curvature spinors: One of them is Ricci spinor and the other is Weyl conformal spinor [
1,
3,
4,
5].
At any points on a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, we can find a locally flat coordinate [
6], whose metric is Minkowski. While the metric is locally Minkowski, the second derivative of the metric is not necessarily zero and the Riemann curvature tensor as well as curvature spinors do not have to be zero. Here we can obtain the explicit representations of curvature spinors, the components of which can be easily identified by using new techniques, i.e., manipulating spinor indices and rotating sigma basis in locally flat coordinates [
7]. Then all the components of curvature spinors are represented with simple combinations of Riemann curvature tensors. Here the representations are not described by the four-dimensional basis but by the three-dimensional basis ⊗ three-dimensional basis, and thus it suggests a different interpretation of time. The process has been applied on both Ricci spinor and Weyl spinor, which are curvature spinors, and each spinor is described as the sum of two newly defined parts; one of which is a real part and the other is a pure imaginary part. The obtained representation can be used not only in a special flat coordinate but also for vielbein indices or in any other normal coordinates, like Riemann normal coordinate and Fermi coordinate [
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16]. By comparing the final forms of Ricci spinor with the spinor form of Einstein equation, we figure out the roles of each component of Riemann curvature tensor, whose components serve as momentum, energy or stress of gravitational fields. Furthermore, we show that the components of Weyl conformal spinor can be represented as a simple combination of Wely tensors in flat coordinate.
There are already quite a few papers that show the relation between gravitational fields and Cayley–Dickson algebras including sedenion; however, all papers are restricted to a weak gravitational field in a flat frame [
17,
18,
19,
20,
21,
22]. Here we express the basis of sedenion as a set of direct products of a quaternion basis, through which we can define a new algebra ‘sedon’, whose structure is similar to sedenion except for the basis multiplication rule. We show that the curvature spinors for general gravitational fields in locally flat coordinates can be regarded as a sedon. The spinors are described on the direct procduct of totally seperated left-handed basis and right-handed quaternion basis. From this, we can get a view of the gravitational effects as the combination of right-handed and left-handed rotational effects. We also introduce a few applications of the sedon form with multiplication techniques. One of the application is the quaternion form of differential Bianchi identity and, in the process, we introduce a new index notation with the spatially opposite-handed quantities.
2. Tensor Representation of a Field with Two Spinor Indices
In this section we introduce the basics about the 2-spinor formalism, which have been already explained in detail in our earlier paper [
7]. We use the front part of Latin small letters
and Greek letters
… as four dimensional space-time indices, which can be
or 3. The later part of Latin small letters
, which can be
or 3, are used as three dimensional indices.
Any tensor
with spacetime indices
, can be inverted into a spinor with spinor indices
like
by multiplying Infeld-van der Waerden symbols
,
In Minkowski spacetime,
is
, where
are four-sigma matrices
;
is
identity matrix and
are Pauli matrices. Equation (
1) can be written conventionally as
Any arbitrary anti-symmetric tensor
can be expressed as the sum of two symmetric spinors as
where
and
are symmetric spinors (unprimed and primed spinor indices can be switched back and forth each other), and
,
,
,
are the
-spinors whose components are
[
1];
. If
is real, then
(where
is the complex conjugate of
) and
We have shown the components of
and
explicitly in flat spacetime in [
7]. The sign conventions for the Minkowski metric is
.
For any real anti-symmetric tensor
, we can write as
where
, then
where we used the relation
. This can be established when the space-time metric is locally flat [
1,
23]. If we apply the relations to the general coordinates with relevant modifications, the results for arbitrary coordinates can be obtained.
becomes
where
are the three-dimensional vector indices which have the value 1, 2 or 3, and
is
for the Levi–Civita symbol
. Einstein summation convention is used for three-dimensional vector indices
and
k. Similar to Equations (
8) and (
9),
If we denote matrix representation of
by
, then
Let us define
and
as
where
is complex conjugate of
. Then
and
where
have unprimed indices
and
have primed indices
.
3. Einstein Field Equations and Curvature Spinors
In this section we introduce the basics about general relativity in the 2-spinor formalism, and flat coordinates on the pseudo-Riemannian manifold. For a (torsion-free) Riemann curvature tensor
where
is a Chistoffel symbol
Here
has follwing properties [
6]
In short, we can denote as
where parentheses ( ) and square brackets [ ] indicates symmetrization and anti-symmetrization of the indices [
6]. The Riemann curvature tensor has two kinds of Bianchi identities
where
.
From the antisymmetric properties of Riemann curvature tensor, it can be decomposed into sum of curvature spinors,
and
, as
where
The totally symmetric part of
is called gravitational spinor or Weyl conformal spinor, and
is referred as Ricci spinor [
1,
4,
5]. It is well known that
and Einstein tensor is
where
, which is equal to
[
1]. Therefore, the Einstein field equation
where
is a cosmology constant, can be written in the form
Since any symmetric tensor
can be expressed as
where
and
is traceless and symmetric [
1], the traceless part of the energy-momentum (symmetric) tensor
can be written by
. Therefore, the spinor form of Einstein Equations (
34) becomes
Weyl tensor
which is another measure of the curvature of spacetime, like Riemann curvature tensor, is defined as [
6,
24]
It has the same propterties as Equations (
22), (
23) and (
26). It is known [
1] that Weyl tensor has the following relationship with Weyl conformal spinor
:
At any point
P on the pseudo-Riemannian manifold, we can find a flat coordinate system, such that,
where
is the metric at the point
P and
is the Minkowski metric. In this coordinate system, while the Christoffel symbol is zero, the Riemann curvature tensor is [
25,
26]
For future use we introduce Fermi coordinate, which is one of the locally flat coordinate whose time axis is a tangent of a geodesic. The coordinate follows the Fermi conditions
along the geodesic G.
4. The Tensor Representation of Curvature Spinors
In this section we show the process of representing curvature spinors in 4 × 4 matrices or 3 × 3 matrices. We discuss physical implications of those representations. From now on, we will always use locally flat coordinate for all spacetime indices.
From Equations (
4) and (
28), we can lead to
where
from Equations (
18) and (
19). We write here the form of
as
for convenience; it is not so difficult to recover the upper- and lower-indices. By decomposing
one more times, we get
We note that
and
X are expressed with two three-dimensional basis like the form in 3 × 3 basis. Even though there is no 0-th base, which may be related to the curvature of time,
and
X can fully describe the spacetime structure. If
and
X are represented in Fermi coordinate, the disappearance of 0-th compomonents of the
basis may come from the fact that time follows proper time. However, since here Equations (
45) and (
46) are expressed not only in Fermi coordinate but also in general locally flat coordinates, whose 0-th coordinate may not be time direction, the representations like Equations (
45) and (
46) may demand a new interpretation of the curvature of time, which is not just as a component of fourth (or 0-th) axis in 4-dimensional space-time. Technically the interpretation of the space-time structure, which was considered to be a bundle of four directions, might be reconsidered.
We can divide Equation (
45) into two terms by defining
where
is anti-symmetric and
is symmetric for
. Then Equation (
45) is represented as
The components of
and
can be simply expressed as
where the underlined symbols in subscripts are the value-fixed indices which does not sum up for dummy indices; one of example is
.
We can express
as a tensor by multiplying
, which is
where sigma matrices with superscript
and
mean the transpose and the complex conjugate of
. To calculate
, let us define
Values of
are shown in
Table 1.
Using this table, we get 4 × 4 representation of
as
which is a real tensor and
, as expected.
From Equations (
32), (
33) and (
56), we can find that
and
are also non-diagonal components of
and
. By comparing Equation (
34) with Equation (
56), we can interpret
as a momentum and
as a stress of a spacetime fluctuation. We can also observe from Equations (
47) and (
48) that the component of the Riemann curvature tensor of the form
is linked to a momentum, and the form
,
linked to a stress-energy.
Now we investigate
and
more in detail. Before representing
X and
in matrix form, we can check Equation (
46) to find out whether
or not. From the properties of Riemann curvature tensor, Ricci scalar is
For Minckowski metric
,
R becomes
Because
we can finally see that
from Equation (
46). We have used
by Bianchi identity.
To represent the spinors
X and
in simple matrix forms, we first define
where
and
both are symmetric for
. Then, we have
from Equation (
46). This can be expressed in a
matrix form by multiplying the factors in a similar way to the Equation (
56), but here it is useful to multiply by
for simplicity, instead of
, where the components of
is equal to
defined in Equation (
15):
Since
is symmetric for
, it becomes
For Wely conformal spinor
,
Considering the symmetricity of
, it becomes
The components of
are expressed as symmetric tensors. As we can see on Equation (
67) and Matrix (
68),
includes all information of
. Because of Wely tensor
, we may conclude that all informations of Weyl tensor are comprehended in
.
The form of Matrix (
68) is similar to the tidal tensor
with a potential
:
where
and
[
27,
28]. The similarity may come from the link between tidal forces and Weyl tensor. The tidal force in general relativity is described by the Riemann curvature tensor. The Riemman curvature tensor
can be decomposed to
, where
is a traceless part which is a Weyl tensor and
is a remaining part which consists of Ricci tensor
and
[
6]. In the Schwartzchild metric, since
but
, the tidal forces are described by Weyl tensor. This shows that
,
and
are all related to the tidal effects.
The components of
and
can be represented with Weyl tensors. In a flat coordinate, by using
and Equation (
58), the components of Weyl tensor referred to as Equation (
37) can be expressed as
Comparing Equations (
71)—(
74) with Equations (
61) and (
62), we find that
Therefore, Matrix (
68) can be rewritten to
Since
is zero by Bianchi identity, it becomes
Equation (
63) can be reformulated to
where
. Therefore, we can finally find the relation
Here we can see the equivalence and the direct correspondences among , and Weyl tensor.
5. Definition of Sedon and Relations among Spinors, Sedenion and Sedon
In this section, we investigate the basis of sedenion and we define a new algebra which is a similar structure to sedenion. Sedenion is 16 dimensional noncommutative and nonassociative algebra, which can be obtained from Cayley–Dickson construction [
29,
30]. The multiplication table of sedenion basis is shown in
Table 2. The elements of sedenion basis can be represented in the form
with
, where
,
. The multiplication rule can be written by
, where
is +1 or −1, which is determined by
[
7].
Table 3 shows the multiplication table of an algebra which is similar to sedenion. It consists of 16 bases
with
and the multiplication rule
. The table is almost the same as the multiplication table of sedenion basis, but just differs in signs. The signs of red colored elements in
Table 3 differ from
Table 2. We will call this algebra as ‘sedon’.
Sedon can be written in the form
where
,
,
,
,
, and
. We can name
as ‘right svector’,
as ‘left svector’, and
as ‘stensor’. The coefficient of sedon can be represented as in
Table 4. For example,
is a coefficient of
term.
Now we will see the relation between Ricci spinors and the sedon. Since
therefore
Equation (
50) can be reformulated as
Since
is isomorphic to
, we can set
. Equation (
86) can be written as
which can be regarded as a sedon. In a similar way,
can be written as
From Equation (
87), a Ricci spinor can be interpreted as a combination of a right-handed and a left-handed rotational operations, since the basis has the form ‘left-handed quaternion ⊗ right- handed quaternion’. Following the rotational interpretation of Cayley–Dickson algebra [
7], it can be interpreted as the twofold rotation ⊗ twofold rotation.
For two quaternions
and
, which can be represented in the
matrix representation with spinor indices (
and
), the multiplication of them can be written as
We can use this to express multiplications of spinors. One of the example is
where
. The result is also a sedon form. Above example shows not only multiplications of
but also the general multiplication of stensor. Here is an another example: An antisymmetric differential operator
can be divided into two parts
where
and
. As we can see in Equations (
9) and (
11), each term can be considered as a quaternion.
Then,
can be considered as a multiplication of a quaternion and a sedon.
where
.
in the last term can be changed as
. The result in Equation (
94) is in a sedon form. Using those expressions, we can represent the quantities with spinor indices as sedon forms whose elements are components of tensors.
7. Conclusions
We established a new method to express curvature spinors, which allows us to grasp components of the spinors easily in a locally inertial frame. During such a process, we technically utilized modified sigma matrices as a basis, which are sigma matrices multiplied by
, and calculated the product of sigma matrices with mixed spinor indices. Using those modified sigma matrices as a basis can be regarded as the rotation of the basis of four sigma matrices
to
defined in Equation (
14), similar to a rotation of quaternion basis as shown in our previous work [
7]. By comparing the Ricci spinor with the spinor form of Einstein equation, we could appreciate the roles of each component of the Riemann curvature tensor. The newly defined (3,3) tensors related to curvature tensors were introduced, and furthermore, from the representation of Weyl conformal spinor, we find that the components of Weyl tensor can be replaced by complex quantities
, which are defined in Equation (
63). We represented the elements of sedenion basis as the direct product of elements of the quaternion bases themselves. Then we defined a new algebra ‘sedon’, which has the same basis representation except for a slightly modified multiplication rule from the multiplication rule of sedenion. The relations between sedon and the curvature spinors are derived for a general gravitational field, not just for a weak gravitational field. We calculated multiplications of spinors with a quaternion form, and observed that the results of the multiplications are also represented in a sedon form. The relations among quaternion, sedon and curvature spinors may imply that gravity could be the consequence of combination of right-handed and left-handed abstract rotational operations.
A few applications of the sedon representations were also introduced. One of the applications represented the Bianchi identity in the quaternion form, which might give the fluidic interpretation of the identity. We also suggested further possible application in modified gravity and quantum gravity. This may suggest that the spin-handedness, spatial-handedness, and spins of matter field would affect gravitational phenomena. The handedness structure of gravitational force has not yet been considered seriously. The sedon representation can be primarily a tool in which the handedness in gravity could be considered in detail. Finally we note that the research of this paper can be extended to general coordinates by considering vielbein formalism [
35] and/or by establishing a connection to either self-dual or anti-self-dual variables [
36,
37].