Spinors and gravity without Lorentz indices

Abstract

Coupling spinor fields to the gravitational field, in the setting of general relativity, is standardly done via the introduction of a vierbein field and the (associated minimal) spin connection field. This makes three types of indices feature in the formalism: world/coordinate indices, Lorentz vector indices, and Lorentz spinor indices, respectively. This article will show, though, that it is possible to dispense altogther with the Lorentz indices, both tensorial ones and spinorial ones, obtaining a formalism featuring only world indices. This will be possible by having both the 'Dirac operator' and the generators of 'Lorentz' transformations become spacetime-dependent, although covariantly constant. The formalism is developed in the setting of complexified quaternions.