Consequences of propagating torsion in connection-dynamic theories of gravity.

We discuss the possibility of constraining theories of gravity in which the connection is a fundamental variable by searching for observational consequences of the torsion degrees of freedom. In a wide class of models, the only modes of the torsion tensor which interact with matter are either a massive scalar or a massive spin-1 boson. Focusing on the scalar version, we study constraints on the two-dimensional parameter space characterizing the theory. For reasonable choices of these parameters the torsion decays quickly into matter fields, and no long-range fields are generated which could be discovered by ground-based or astrophysical experiments. CTP # 2291 March 1994 gr-qc/9403058 ∗ This work was supported in part by NASA under Grants no. NAGW-931 and NGT50850, by the National Science Foundation under grant PHY/92-06867, and by the U.S. Department of Energy (D.O.E.) under contract no. DE-FC02-94ER40818.