1994/03/31 by Sean M. Carroll, George B. Field
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Boson #Classical mechanics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Geometry #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Mathematics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Theoretical physics #Torsion (gastropod) #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.50.3867
published as Phys.Rev. D50 (1994) 3867-3873 · 16 pages plus one figure (plain TeX), MIT-CTP #2291. (Extraordinarily minor corrections.)
arxiv created 1994/06/16 · openalex publication_date 1994/09/15 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We discuss the possibility of constraining theories of gravity in which the connection is a fundamental variable by searching for observational consequences of the torsion degrees of freedom. In a wide class of models, the only modes of the torsion tensor which interact with matter are either a massive scalar or a massive spin-1 boson. Focusing on the scalar version, we study constraints on the two-dimensional parameter space characterizing the theory. For reasonable choices of these parameters the torsion decays quickly into matter fields, and no long-range fields are generated which could be discovered by ground-based or astrophysical experiments.