Back to the Contents section

The approach presented here is one of the most direct routes possible. I plagiarized it from a number of sources and added my bit of finesse to it i.e. no introduction to all that superfluous mumbo jumbo that disappears without actually doing anything, but confuses you like no bodies business. Most steps are shown in complete detail, cos I remember I was totally lost when I first learned this stuff.

So, no beating about the bush, onward with a quick derivation of the covariant derivative.

Consider a vector or tensor of rank 1, with components

or in full notation

The covariant derivative is defined by deriving the second order tensor obtained by

No mystery at all here, we just have to account for the fact that the basis vectors are not constant by using the usual differentiation of the product rule. Note the ";" to indicate the covariant derivative.

The last term containing the derivative of the basis vector can clearly be expressed as a sum of the basis vectors themselves. This will be written as:

Where the big funny R shape is to be determined, and is called the Christoffel symbol of the 2^nd kind, and not to be confused with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was crap, and almost as bad as ET it was.

Also note the new introduction of "," to mean ordinary partial derivative.

So now the covariant derivative can be written as:

which means that the covariant derivative of the vector, specified only by its components, can now be expressed as

Which is indeed a tensor, but we certainly don’t care one iota about proving that it is a tensor, some other fool can do that.

Now lets consider a second order tensor

Then calculating its covariant derivative by differentiating by parts, and using the above results, gives

or, after expanding and collecting up terms as we did above

And if your so inclined, you can go and derive the covariant derivative for a downstairs index as

Next task my Tellytubbys, is to derive the Christoffel symbols so that we can actually do something.

To start off, the Symmetry ofis first shown

, back to the other pages for refresher if you've forgotten this

From our previous result above,

then

is also symmetrical wrt alpha and beta

Laa Laa now writes from the above

or

and due to the symmetry found above, we can also write

So adding these last two gives

So, by re-differentiating, the following line can immediately be seen to be correct, don’t you just love these ones, ah.

There my Teletubbies, weren't that nice and easy, now its down to the pub to wash this all down with a pint of Guinness. See if we can impress the Birds with this one, but before you go, if you use the result to calculate the covariant derivative of the metric tensor itself, you'll get naff all, hence you can treat them as constants., oh and by the way this last result is called Ricci's Theorem, cos his mum done it first.

Copyright © of Kevin Aylward, 2000-2006, all rights reserved.

This paper may be reproduced so long as it is reproduced in full along with this copyright notice, so that your truly gets full credit for it and no profit is made from it

http://www.kevinaylward.co.uk