Torsion tensor

In differential geometry, the notion of torsion is a manner of characterizing the amount of slipping or twisting that a plane does when rolling along a surface or higher dimensional affine manifold.

For example, consider rolling a plane along a small circle drawn on a sphere. If the plane does not slip or twist, then when the plane is rolled all the way along the circle, it will also trace a circle in the plane. It turns out that the plane will have rotated (despite there being no twist whilst rolling it), an effect due to the curvature of the sphere. But the curve traced out will still be a circle, and so in particular a closed curve that begins and ends at the same point. On the other hand, if the plane were rolled along the sphere, but it was allowed it to slip or twist in the process, then the path the circle traces on the plane could be a much more general curve that need not even be closed. The torsion is a way to quantify this additional slipping and twisting while rolling a plane along a curve.

The torsion tensor is related to, although distinct from, the torsion of a curve, as it appears in the Frenet–Serret formulas, which quantifies the twist of a curve about its tangent vector as the curve evolves (or rather the rotation of the Frenet–Serret frame about the tangent vector). In the geometry of surfaces, the geodesic torsion describes how a surface twists about a curve on the surface. The companion notion of curvature measures how moving frames roll along a curve without slipping or twisting.

More generally, on a differentiable manifold equipped with an affine connection (that is, a connection in the tangent bundle), torsion and curvature form the two fundamental invariants of the connection. In this context, torsion gives an intrinsic characterization of how tangent spaces twist about a curve when they are parallel transported; whereas curvature describes how the tangent spaces roll along the curve. Torsion may be described concretely as a tensor, or as a vector-valued 2-form on the manifold. If ∇ is an affine connection on a differential manifold, then the torsion tensor is defined, in terms of vector fields X and Y, by

${\displaystyle T(X,Y)=\nabla _{X}Y-\nabla _{Y}X-[X,Y]}$

where [X,Y] is the Lie bracket of vector fields.

Torsion is particularly useful in the study of the geometry of geodesics. Given a system of parametrized geodesics, one can specify a class of affine connections having those geodesics, but differing by their torsions. There is a unique connection which absorbs the torsion, generalizing the Levi-Civita connection to other, possibly non-metric situations (such as Finsler geometry). The difference between a connection with torsion, and a corresponding connection without torsion is a tensor, called the contorsion tensor. Absorption of torsion also plays a fundamental role in the study of G-structures and Cartan's equivalence method. Torsion is also useful in the study of unparametrized families of geodesics, via the associated projective connection. In relativity theory, such ideas have been implemented in the form of Einstein–Cartan theory.