arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J. B. Formiga.
Here I obtain the conditions necessary for the conservation of the Dirac current when one substitutes the assumption $γ^A_{\ \ |B}=0$ for $γ^A_{\ \ |B}=[V_B,γ^A]$, where the $γ^A$s are the Dirac matrices and "$|$" represents the components of the covariant derivative. As an application, I apply these conditions to the model used in Ref. [M. Novello, Phys. Rev. {\bf D8}, 2398 (1973)].
Here I present a full list with all possibles products between the generators of the Clifford algebra in a four-dimensional spacetime. The resulting expressions turned out to be very simple and easy to deal with.
Recently there has been an interest in studying the role that geometry may play in the problem of confining fermions to our four-dimensional spacetime. In general, the focus is on non-Riemannian geometries which possess fields like torsion and non-metricity. In this paper, the degrees of freedom present in the spin connection in a Riemannian manifold are used to confine fermions. It turns out that one can use this connection to trap these particles inside a brane.
We consider a five-dimensional model in which fermions are confined in a hypersurface due to an interaction with a purely geometric field. Inspired by the Rubakov-Shaposhnikov field-theoretical model, in which massless fermions can be localized in a domain wall through the interaction of a scalar field, we show that particle confinement may also take place if we endow the five-dimensional bulk with a Weyl integrable geometric structure, or if we assume the existence of a torsion field acting in the bulk. In this picture, the kind of interaction considered in the Rubakov-Shaposhnikov model is replaced by the interaction of fermions with a geometric field, namely a Weyl scalar field or a torsion field. We show that in both cases the confinement is independent of the energy and the mass of the fermionic particle. We generalize these results to the case in which the bulk is an arbitrary n-dimensional curved space.
We revisit the Riemann-Cartan geometry in the context of recent higher-dimensional theories of spacetime. After introducing the concept of torsion in a modern geometrical language we present some results that represent extensions of Riemannian theorems. We consider the theory of local embeddings and submanifolds in the context of Riemann-Cartan geometries and show how a Riemannian spacetime may be locally and isometrically embedded in a bulk with torsion. As an application of this result, we discuss the problem of classical confinement and the stability of motion of particles and photons in the neighbourhood of branes for the case when the bulk has torsion. We illustrate our ideas considering the particular case when the embedding space has the geometry of a warped product space . We show how the confinement and stability properties of geodesics near the brane may be affected by the torsion of the embedding manifold. In this way we construct a classical analogue of quantum confinement inspired in theoretical-field models by replacing a scalar field with a torsion field.
We discuss two effects predicted by the general theory of relativity in the context of Rindler accelerated observers: the gravitational spectral shift and the time delay of light. We show that these effects also appear in a Rindler frame in the absence of gravitational field, in accordance with the Einstein's equivalence principle.
We discuss some aspects of the differential geometry of curves in Minkowski space. We establish the Serret-Frenet equations in Minkowski space and use them to give a very simple proof of the fundamental theorem of curves in Minkowski space. We also state and prove two other theorems which represent Minkowskian versions of a very known theorem of the differential geometry of curves in tridimensional Euclidean space. We discuss the general solution for torsionless paths in Minkowki space. We then apply the four-dimensional Serret-Frenet equations to describe the motion of a charged test particle in a constant and uniform electromagnetic field and show how the curvature and the torsions of the four-dimensional path of the particle contain information on the electromagnetic field acting on the particle.