Irreducible bilinear tensorial concomitants of an arbitrary complex bivector

Abstract

Irreducible bilinear tensorial concomitants of an arbitrary complex antisymmetric valence-2 tensor are derived in four-dimensional spacetime. In addition these bilinear concomitants are symmetric (or antisymmetric), self-dual (or anti-self-dual), and hermitian forms in the antisymmetric tensor. An important example of an antisymmetric valence-2 tensor, or bivector, is the electromagnetic field strength tensor which ordinarily is taken to be real-valued. In generalizing to complex-valued bivectors, the authors find the hermitian form versions of the well-known electromagnetic scalar invariants and stress-energy-momentum tensor, but also discover several novel tensors of total valence 2 and 4. These tensors have algebraic similarities to the Riemann, Weyl, and Ricci tensors.