Coframe geometry, gravity and electromagnetism

The extensions of GR for description of fermions on a curved space, for supergravity, and for the loop quantum gravity ordinary use a set of 16 independent variables instead of 10 components of metric. These variables can be assembled in a coframe field, i.e., a set of four linearly independent 1-forms. In this presentation we review a geometrical structure based on the coframe field. We construct a complete class of the coframe connections which are linear in the first order derivatives of the coframe field on an n dimensional manifolds with and without a metric. The subclasses of the torsion-free, metric-compatible and flat connections are derived. We also study the behavior of the geometrical structures under local transformations of the coframe. The remarkable fact is an existence of a subclass of connections which are invariant when the infinitesimal transformations satisfy the Maxwell-like system of equations.