Charge and the topology of spacetime

A new class of electrically charged wormholes is described in which the outer 2-sphere is not spanned by a compact, co-orientable hypersurface, These wormholes can therefore display net electric charge from the source-free Maxwell equations. This extends the work of Sorkin on non-space-orientable manifolds, to spacetimes which do not admit a time orientation. The work is motivated by the suggestion that quantum theory can be explained by modelling elementary particles as regions of spacetime with non-trivial causal structure. The simplest example of an electrically charged spacetime carries a spherical symmetry

Ricci-corrected derivatives and invariant differential operators

We introduce the notion of Ricci-corrected differentiation in parabolic geometry, which is a modification of covariant differentiation with better transformation properties. This enables us to simplify the explicit formulae for standard invariant operators given in work of Cap, Slovak and Soucek, and at the same time extend these formulae from the context of AHS structures (which include conformal and projective structures) to the more general class of all parabolic structures (including CR structures).Comment: Substantially revised, shortened and simplified, with new treatment of Weyl structures; 24 page