An Introduction to Differential Geometry and General Relativity A collection of notes for PHYM411 Thomas Haworth, School of Physics, Stocker Road, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QL
[email protected] March 29, 2010 Contents 1 Preamble: Qualitative Picture Of Manifolds 4 1.1 Manifolds..................................... 4 2 Distances, Open Sets, Curves and Surfaces 6 2.1 DefiningSpaceAndDistances .......................... 6 2.2 OpenSets..................................... 7 2.3 Parametric Paths and Surfaces in E3 . 8 2.4 Charts....................................... 10 3 Smooth Manifolds And Scalar Fields 11 3.1 OpenCover .................................... 11 3.2 n-Dimensional Smooth Manifolds and Change of Coordinate Transformations . 11 3.3 The Example of Stereographic Projection . 13 3.4 ScalarFields.................................... 15 4 Tangent Vectors and the Tangent Space 16 4.1 SmoothPaths ................................... 16 4.2 TangentVectors.................................. 17 4.3 AlgebraofTangentVectors. 19 4.4 Example, And Another Formulation Of The Tangent Vector . 21 4.5 Proof Of 1 to 1 Correspondance Between Tangent And “Normal” Vectors . 22 5 Covariant And Contravariant Vector Fields 23 5.1 Contravariant Vectors and Contravariant Vector Fields . ..... 24 5.2 Patching Together Local Contavariant Vector Fields . 25 5.3 Covariant Vector Fields . 25 6 Tensor Fields 28 6.1 Proof of the above statement . 31 6.2 TheMetricTensor................................. 31 7 Riemannian Manifolds 32 7.1 TheInnerProduct................................. 32 7.2 Diagonalizing The Metric . 34 7.3 TheSquareNorm................................. 35 7.4 Arclength..................................... 35 8 Covariant Differentiation 35 8.1 Working Towards The Covariant Derivative . 36 8.2 The Covariant Partial Derivative . 38 1 9 The Riemann Curvature Tensor 38 9.1 Working Towards The Curvature Tensor . 39 9.2 Ricci And Einstein Tensors .