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In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the Riemann curvature tensor or Riemann–Christoffel tensor (after Bernhard Riemann and Elwin Bruno Christoffel) is the most common way used to express the curvature of Riemannian manifolds. It assigns a tensor to each point of a Riemannian manifold (i.e., it is a tensor field).
Although individually, the Weyl tensor and Ricci tensor do not in general determine the full curvature tensor, the Riemann curvature tensor can be decomposed into a Weyl part and a Ricci part. This decomposition is known as the Ricci decomposition, and plays an important role in the conformal geometry of Riemannian manifolds.
Let be a smooth manifold and let be a one-parameter family of Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metrics. Suppose that it is a differentiable family in the sense that for any smooth coordinate chart, the derivatives v i j = ∂ ∂ t ( ( g t ) i j ) {\displaystyle v_{ij}={\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}{\big (}(g_{t})_{ij}{\big )}} exist and are ...
The Riemann curvature tensor measures precisely the extent to which parallel transporting vectors around a small rectangle is not the identity map. [28] The Riemann curvature tensor is 0 at every point if and only if the manifold is locally isometric to Euclidean space. [29] Fix a connection on .
The scalar curvature is the total trace of the Riemannian curvature tensor, a smooth function on the manifold (,), and in the Kähler case the condition that the scalar curvature is constant admits a transformation into an equation similar to the complex Monge–Ampere equation of the Kähler–Einstein setting.
Given a Riemannian metric g, the scalar curvature Scal is defined as the trace of the Ricci curvature tensor with respect to the metric: [1] = . The scalar curvature cannot be computed directly from the Ricci curvature since the latter is a (0,2)-tensor field; the metric must be used to raise an index to obtain a (1,1)-tensor field in order to take the trace.
The n-dimensional model is the celestial sphere of the (n + 2)-dimensional Lorentzian space R n+1,1. Here the model is a Klein geometry: a homogeneous space G/H where G = SO(n + 1, 1) acting on the (n + 2)-dimensional Lorentzian space R n+1,1 and H is the isotropy group of a fixed null ray in the light cone.
The Ricci tensor is often thought of as an average value of the sectional curvatures, or as an algebraic trace of the Riemann curvature tensor. However, for the analysis of existence and uniqueness of Ricci flows, it is extremely significant that the Ricci tensor can be defined, in local coordinates, by a formula involving the first and second ...