A New Perspective on Covariant Canonical Gravity

Understand

We present a new approach to the covariant canonical formulation of Einstein-Cartan gravity that preserves the full Lorentz group as the local gauge group.

• The method exploits lessons learned from gravity in 2+1 dimensions regarding the relation between gravity and a general gauge theory.
• The dynamical variables are simply the frame field and the spin-connection pulled-back to the hypersurface, thereby eliminating the need for simplicity constraints on the momenta.
• A consequence of this is a degenerate (pre)symplectic form, which appears to be a necessary feature of the Einstein-Cartan formulation.