Dirac-Hestenes spinor fields on Riemann-Cartan manifolds

In this paper we study Dirac-Hestenes spinor fields (DHSF) on a four-dimensional Riemann-Cartan spacetime (RCST). We prove that these fields must be defined as certain equivalence classes of even sections of the Clifford bundle (over the RCST), thereby being certain particular sections of a new bundle named the spin-Clifford bundle (SCB). The conditions for the existence of the SCB are studied and are shown to be equivalent to Geroch's theorem concerning the existence of spinor structures in a Lorentzian spacetime. We introduce also the covariant and algebraic Dirac spinor fields and compare these with DHSF, showing that all three kinds of spinor fields contain the same mathematical and physical information. We clarify also the notion of (Crumeyrolle's) amorphous spinors (Dirac-Kähler spinor fields are of this type), showing that they cannot be used to describe fermionic fields. We develop a rigorous theory for the covariant derivatives of Clifford fields (sections of the Clifford bundle, CB) and of Dirac-Hestenes spinor fields. We show how to generalize the original Dirac-Hestenes equation in Minkowski spacetime for the case of RCST. Our results are obtained from a variational principle formulated through the multiform derivative approach to Lagrangian field theory in the Clifford bundle.