Complex Gravity and Noncommutative Geometry

Abstract

The presence of a constant background antisymmetric tensor for open strings or D-branes forces the space-time coordinates to be noncommutative. An immediate consequence of this is that all fields get complexified. By applying this idea to gravity one discovers that the metric becomes complex. Complex gravity is constructed by gauging the symmetry $U(1,D-1)$. The resulting action gives one specific form of nonsymmetric gravity. In contrast to other theories of nonsymmetric gravity the action is both unique and gauge invariant. It is argued that for this theory to be consistent one must prove the existence of generalized diffeomorphism invariance. The results are easily generalized to noncommutative spaces.