Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Degenerate spacetimes in first order gravity

Sandipan Sengupta

IIT Gandhinagar

In four dimensional (pure) gravity theory, the standard metric formulation
does not capture the classical solutions for which the metric (tetrad) is
degenerate or noninvertible. The appropriate framework to deal with
degenerate tetrad configurations is the first order formulation of gravity
theory, which is a description based on the tetrad and spin-connection
fields. Here we discuss a systematic framework to find all possible
solutions with degenerate tetrads in classical gravity, and elucidate on
some of their properties to understand why they could be interesting
configurations from the point of view of classical and quantum gravity.