Hi all!

I was considering that it would be great to have the diffgeom module and 
the tensor module work together, as tensors are also part of differential 
geometry arising on the tangent and cotangent spaces of manifolds.

The main problem I face is that in the tensor module, indices of a tensor 
can be declared as belonging to different types. For example, gamma 
matrices can be declared as a (Lorentz, Spinor, Spinor) tensor. The 
question is, how to characterize such a tensor from a differential 
geometric perspective?

The Lorentz and Spinor indices are indices carrying two different 
representation of the symmetry of the universe, they correspond to two 
representation of a Lie algebra, and have their own transformation laws. 
The point is, in SymPy there is no such advanced infrastructure which is 
able to handle principal bundles, so I was wondering if there can be an 
easier approach to this problem.

When I consider the Riemann tensors, for example, R(a, -b, -c, -d), this is 
an element of the tensor product space (T, V, V, V), where T is the tangent 
space, and V is the cotangent space, of the same base manifold, i.e. the 
space time manifold.

Do you think that the gamma matrices, as their indices do not belong to the 
same spaces, can be viewed as a tensor in some power of the tangent space 
of the product space of two manifolds, say the spacetime and something like 
a Clifford Algebra which represents the spinor space?

It would be useful to be able to declare a link to a manifold in the object 
*TensorIndexType*, e.g.:

L = TensorIndexType('L')
M = Manifold('M')
L.manifold = M

in such a way, tensors depending only on *L* would be immediately linked to 
manifold *M*, and it would be possible to use the already implemented 
algorithms in the diffgeom module to perform covariant and Lie derivative, 
as well as compute the Riemann tensor, Ricci tensor from the metric tensor.

The problem remains in mixed indices tensors. Any ideas on how to overcome 
this?

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"sympy" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to sympy+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

Reply via email to