No abstract

We study in detail the equations of the geodesic deviation in multidimensional theories of KaluzaKlein type. We show that their 4-dimensional space-time projections are identical with the equations obtained by direct variation of the usual geodesic equation in the presence of the Lorentz force, provided that the fifth component of the deviation vector satisfies an extra constraint derived here.

On manifolds with non-trivial Killing tensors admitting a square root of the Killing-Yano type one can construct non-standard Dirac operators which differ from, but commute with, the standard Dirac operator. We relate the index problem for the nonstandard Dirac operator to that of the standard Dirac operator. This necessitates a study of manifolds with torsion and boundary and we summarize recent results obtained for such manifolds.

We construct a generalized dynamics for particles moving in a symmetric spacetime, i.e. a space-time admitting one or more Killing vectors. The generalization implies that the effective mass of particles becomes dynamical. We apply this generalized dynamics to the motion of test particles in a static, spherically symmetric metric. A significant consequence of the new framework is to generate an effective negative pressure on a cosmological surface whose expansion is manifest by the particle trajectory via embedding geometry [5,7,15,16]. This formalism thus may give rise to a source for dark energy in modelling the late accelerating universe.

The motion of a compact body in space and time is commonly described by the world line of a point representing the instantaneous position of the body. In General Relativity such a world-line formalism is not quite straightforward because of the strict impossibility to accommodate point masses and rigid bodies. In many situations of practical interest it can still be made to work using an effective hamiltonian or energy-momentum tensor for a finite number of collective degrees of freedom of the compact object. Even so exact solutions of the equations of motion are often not available. In such cases families of world lines of compact bodies in curved space-times can be constructed by a perturbative procedure based on generalized geodesic deviation equations. Examples for simple test masses and for spinning test bodies are presented. *