Tractors and Twistors from conformal Cartan geometry: a gauge theoretic approach II. Twistors

Abstract

Tractors and Twistors bundles both provide natural conformally covariant calculi on $4D$-Riemannian manifolds. They have different origins but are closely related, and usually constructed bottom-up through prolongation of defining differential equations. We propose alternative top-down gauge theoretic constructions, starting from the conformal Cartan bundle $\P$ and its vectorial $E$ and spinorial $\sE$ associated bundles. Our key ingredient is the dressing field method of gauge symmetry reduction, which allows to exhibit tractors and twistors and their associated connections as gauge fields of a non-standard kind as far as Weyl rescaling symmetry is concerned. By \emph{non-standard} we mean that they implement the gauge principle of physics, but are of a different geometric nature than the well known differential geometric objects usually underlying gauge theories. We provide the corresponding BRST treatment. In a companion paper we dealt with tractors, in the present one we address the case of twistors.

24 pages, correction eq. (29)

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• From Special Relativity to embedded generators in Cartan subalgebras of rank-4 spin algebras