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Concept
Gauge gravitation theory
Summary
In quantum field theory, gauge gravitation theory is the effort to extend Yang–Mills theory, which provides a universal description of the fundamental interactions, to describe gravity.
Gauge gravitation theory should not be confused with the similarly-named gauge theory gravity, which is a formulation of (classical) gravitation in the language of geometric algebra. Nor should it be confused with Kaluza–Klein theory, where the gauge fields are used to describe particle fields, but not gravity itself.
The first gauge model of gravity was suggested by Ryoyu Utiyama (1916–1990) in 1956 just two years after birth of the gauge theory itself. However, the initial attempts to construct the gauge theory of gravity by analogy with the gauge models of internal symmetries encountered a problem of treating general covariant transformations and establishing the gauge status of a pseudo-Riemannian metric (a tetrad field).
In order to overcome this drawback, representing tetrad fields as gauge fields of the translation group was attempted. Infinitesimal generators of general covariant transformations were considered as those of the translation gauge group, and a tetrad (coframe) field was identified with the translation part of an affine connection on a world manifold . Any such connection is a sum of a linear world connection and a soldering form where is a non-holonomic frame. For instance, if is the Cartan connection, then is the canonical soldering form on . There are different physical interpretations of the translation part of affine connections. In gauge theory of dislocations, a field describes a distortion. At the same time, given a linear frame , the decomposition motivates many authors to treat a coframe as a translation gauge field.
Difficulties of constructing gauge gravitation theory by analogy with the Yang–Mills one result from the gauge transformations in these theories belonging to different classes. In the case of internal symmetries, the gauge transformations are just vertical automorphisms of a principal bundle leaving its base fixed.
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