HAMILTONIAN ANALYSIS OF POINCARÉ GAUGE THEORY: HIGHER SPIN MODES

We examine several higher spin modes of the Poincaré gauge theory (PGT) of gravity using the Hamiltonian analysis. The appearance of certain undesirable effects due to nonlinear constraints in the Hamiltonian analysis are used as a test. We find that the phenomena of field activation and constraint bifurcation both exist in the pure spin 1 and the pure spin 2 modes. The coupled spin-0^- and spin-2^- modes also fail our test due to the appearance of constraint bifurcation. The "promising" case in the linearized theory of the PGT given by Kuhfuss and Nitsch¹ likewise does not pass. From this analysis of these specific PGT modes we conclude that an examination of such nonlinear constraint effects shows great promise as a strong test for this and other alternate theories of gravity.