Torsion and related concepts: An introductory overview

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of all the basic aspects of the torsion of a manifold, with particular stress on the expressions in an anholonomic basis. After a brief review of anholonomic bases and Koszul covariant derivative, we show how the expressions for the torsion and the Riemann tensors in a general (anholonomic) basis arise from their expressions in a coordinate basis. We further derive the expression for the contortion tensor, which arises from the requirement that an affine connection with torsion be metric (preserving). The latter requirement is related to the equivalence principle, whose mathematical aspects in a manifold with torsion are discussed next. Finally, we derive the expression for the distortion tensor, which is an analog of the curvature tensor but arising from the torsion rather than the metric tensor.