Gauge Theory of Gravity and Spacetime

Abstract

The advent of general relativity settled it once and for all that a theory of spacetime is inextricably linked to the theory of gravity. From the point of view of the gauge principle of Weyl and Yang-Mills-Utiyama, it became manifest around the 1960s (Sciama--Kibble) that gravity is closely related to the Poincare group acting in Minkowski space. The gauging of this external group induces a Riemann-Cartan geometry on spacetime. If one generalizes the gauge group of gravity, one finds still more involved spacetime geometries. If one specializes it to the translation group, one finds a specific Riemann-Cartan geometry with teleparallelism (Weitzenbock geometry).