Difficulties of Teleparallel Theories of Gravity with Local Lorentz Symmetry

Abstract

A brief discussion is made about the relevance of surface terms in the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of theories of gravity. These surface terms play an important role in the variation of the action integral and in the definition of field quantities such as the gravitational energy-momentum. Then we point out several inconsistencies of a recently proposed formulation of teleparallel theories of gravity with local Lorentz symmetry.

18 pages, no figures, several references added. In addition to previous criticisms, we show that there is an inconsistency stemming from the definition of proper frames in the context of teleparallel theories with a flat spin connection. Published in the Classical and Quantum Gravity