Tensor Operations on Degenerate Inner Product Spaces

Abstract

Well-known operations defined on a non-degenerate inner product vector space are extended to the case of a degenerate inner product. The main obstructions to the extension of these operations to the degenerate case are (1) the index lowering operation is not invertible, and (2) we cannot associate to the inner product in a canonical way a reciprocal inner product on the dual of the vector space. This article shows how these obstructions can be avoided naturally, allowing a canonical definition of covariant contraction for some important special cases. The primary motivation of this article is to lay down the algebraic foundation for the construction of invariants in Singular Semi-Riemannian Geometry, especially those related to the curvature. It turns out that the operations discussed here are enough for this purpose (arXiv:1105.0201, arXiv:1105.3404, arXiv:1111.0646). Such invariants can be applied to the study of singularities in the theory of General Relativity (arXiv:1111.4837, arXiv:1111.4332, arXiv:1111.7082, arXiv:1108.5099, arXiv:1112.4508).