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Fermions in the Ashtekar-Barbero connection formalism for arbitrary values of the Immirzi parameter

Journal Article · · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields
 [1]
  1. Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita di Roma 'La Sapienza', Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, I-00185, Rome (Italy)

The Ashtekar-Barbero-Immirzi formulation of general relativity is extended to include spinor matter fields. Our formulation applies to generic values of the Immirzi parameter and reduces to the Ashtekar-Romano-Tate approach when the Immirzi parameter is taken equal to the imaginary unit. The dynamics of the gravity-fermions coupled system is described by the Holst plus Dirac action with a nonminimal coupling term. The nonminimal interaction together with the Holst modification to the Hilbert-Palatini action reconstruct the Nieh-Yan invariant, so that the effective action coming out is the one of Einstein-Cartan theory with a typical Fermi-like interaction term: in spite of the presence of spinor matter fields, the Immirzi parameter plays no role in the classical effective dynamics and results to be only a multiplicative factor in front of a total divergence. We reduce the total action of the theory to the sum of dynamically independent Ashtekar-Romano-Tate actions for self and anti-self-dual connections, with different weights depending on the Immirzi parameter. This allows to calculate the constraints of the complete theory in a simple way, it is only necessary to realize that the Barbero-Immirzi connection is a weighted sum of the self and anti-self-dual Ashtekar connections. Finally the obtained constraints for the separated action result to be polynomial in terms of the self and anti-self-dual connections, this could have implications in the inclusion of spinor matter in the framework of nonperturbative quantum gravity.

OSTI ID:
20782915
Journal Information:
Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Journal Name: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 73; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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