Spinors and diffeomorphisms

We discuss the action of diffeomorphisms on spinors on an oriented manifoldM. To do this, we first describe the action of the diffeomorphism groupD(M) on the set =H ¹ (M,Z ₂) of inequivalent spin structures and show that it is affine. We argue that in the presence of spinors the gauge group of gravity is a certain double cover ofD(M) which depends on the spin structure. We explicitly compute the action ofD(M) on whenM is a closed Riemann surface; is seen to consist of exactly two orbits, corresponding to even and odd spin structures.On leave of absence from I.F.T., University of Wrocaw, Poland