Tetrad formalism in the solution of spherically symmetric spacetime in general relativity

Abstract

Spherically symmetric solutions in general relativity are the most fundamental solutions to the Einstein field equation. The first exact solution of the Einstein field equation is the spherically symmetric solution given by the Schwarzschild metric, as easily found in any standard textbook on general relativity. The FLRW (Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walkers) metric is another spherically symmetric solution of Einstein’s equation describing the standard model in Cosmology. The standard approach to solving Einstein’s equations is by considering the metric. However, we can also adopt a tetrad-based method or tetrad formalism. We review these two solutions by the tetrad formalism as an alternative approach. In addition, we give some more cases, including the cosmological constant and the Taub-NUT metric.