All Physics Faculty Publications

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Journal/Book Title/Conference

The Sixth Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics

Publisher

American Mathematical Society

Publication Date

1997

First Page

125

Last Page

136

Abstract

Many important features of a field theory, e.g., conserved currents, symplectic structures, energy-momentum tensors, etc., arise as tensors locally constructed from the fields and their derivatives. Such tensors are naturally defined as geometric objects on the jet space of solutions to the field equations. Modern results from the calculus on jet bundles can be combined with a powerful spinor parametrization of the jet space of Einstein metrics to unravel basic features of the Einstein equations. These techniques have been applied to computation of generalized symmetries and “characteristic cohomology” of the Einstein equations, and lead to results such as a proof of non-existence of “local observables” for vacuum spacetimes and a uniqueness theorem for the gravitational symplectic structure.

Comments

Originally published by the American Mathematical Society. PDF of book chapter can be accessed through arXiv.org. This publication can be purchased through the AMS Bookstore.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9508005

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