Sources of torsion in Poincare gauge theory

Abstract

We study sources for torsion in Poincare gauge theory of any dimension, signature, and spin. We find that symmetric kinetic terms for non-Yang-Mills bosonic fields of arbitrary rank drive torsion. Our detailed discussion of spin-3/2 Rarita-Schwinger fields shows that they source all independent parts of the torsion. We develop systematic notation for spin-(2k+1)/2 fields and find the spin tensor for arbitrary k in n > 2k dimensions. For k > 0 there is a novel direct coupling between torsion and spinor fields. We also cast the well-known gauge relation between the canonical and Belinfante-Rosenfield energy tensors in terms of different choices of independent variables.