Würzburg 2018 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 3: Alternative theories of gravity and general formalism

GR 3.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 16:50–17:10, NW-Bau - HS3

Teleparallel theories of gravity in analogy to (non-linear) theories of electrodynamics — Manuel Hohmann, Laur Järv, Martin Krssak, and •Christian Pfeifer — Laboratory for theortical physics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

The teleparallel formulation of gravity theories reveals close structural analogies to electrodynamics, which are more hidden in their usual formulation in terms of the curvature of spacetime. In this talk I will demonstrate how every locally Lorentz invariant teleparallel theory of gravity with second order field equations can be understood as built from a gravitational field strength and excitation tensor which are related to each other by a gravitational constitutive relation. This construction is analogous to the axiomatic formulation of theories of electrodynamics, where different theories are distingusihed by an electromagnetic constitutive relation which expresses the electromagnetic excitation in terms of the electromagnetic field strength. The advantage of this approach to gravity is that the field equations for different models all take the same compact form and general results can be obtained.

To demonstrate the strength of our approach I will present the general teleparalel gravitational field equations in this language and display constitutive laws for previously studied teleparallel theories of gravity, including the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity and so called f(T)-models.