Unified formalism for Palatini gravity

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the construction of a unified formalism for Palatini and unimodular gravity. The idea is to employ a relationship between unified formalism for a Griffiths variational problem and its classical Lepage-equivalent variational problem. The main geometrical tools involved in these constructions are canonical forms living on the first jet of the frame bundle for the spacetime manifold. These forms play an essential role in providing a global version of the Palatini Lagrangian and expressing the metricity condition in an invariant form. With them, we were able to find the associated equations of motion in invariant terms and, by using previous results from the literature, to prove their involutivity. As a bonus, we showed how this construction can be used to provide a unified formalism for the so-called unimodular gravity by employing a reduction of the structure group of the frame bundle to the special linear group.