Eur. Phys. J. C (2018) 78: 195
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-018-5669-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Dirac field and gravity in NC model

Faculty of Physics, University of Belgrade, Studentski trg 12, 11000, Beograd, Serbia

^* e-mail: rvoja@ipb.ac.rs

Received: 27 November 2017
Accepted: 24 February 2018
Published online: 8 March 2018

Abstract

Action for the Dirac spinor field coupled to gravity on noncommutative (NC) Moyal-Weyl spacetime is obtained without prior knowledge of the metric tensor. We emphasize gauge origins of gravity and its interaction with fermions by demonstrating that a classical action invariant under SO(2, 3) gauge transformations can be exactly reduced to the Dirac action in curved spacetime after breaking the original symmetry down to the local Lorentz SO(1, 3) symmetry. The commutative SO(2, 3) invariant action can be straightforwardly deformed via Moyal-Weyl -product to its NC invariant version which can be expanded perturbatively in powers of the deformation parameter using the Seiberg-Witten map. The NC gravity-matter couplings in the expansion arise as an effect of the gauge symmetry breaking. We calculate in detail the first order NC correction to the classical Dirac action in curved spacetime and show that it does not vanish. Moreover, linear NC effects are apparent even in flat spacetime. We analyse NC deformation of the Dirac equation, Feynman propagator and dispersion relation for electrons in Minkowski spacetime and conclude that constant NC background acts as a birefringent medium for electrons propagating in it.