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There is an ()-dimensional family of such 2-planes, and so only in dimensions 2 and 3 does the Ricci tensor determine the full curvature tensor. A notable exception is when the manifold is given a priori as a hypersurface of Euclidean space .
With this convention, the Ricci tensor is a (0,2)-tensor field defined by R jk =g il R ijkl and the scalar curvature is defined by R=g jk R jk. (Note that this is the less common sign convention for the Ricci tensor; it is more standard to define it by contracting either the first and third or the second and fourth indices, which yields a Ricci ...
The number of each upper and lower indices of a tensor gives its type: a tensor with p upper and q lower indices is said to be of type (p, q), or to be a type-(p, q) tensor. The number of indices of a tensor, regardless of variance, is called the degree of the tensor (alternatively, its valence , order or rank , although rank is ambiguous).
Although individually, the Weyl tensor and Ricci tensor do not in general determine the full curvature tensor, the Riemann curvature tensor can be decomposed into a Weyl part and a Ricci part. This decomposition is known as the Ricci decomposition, and plays an important role in the conformal geometry of Riemannian manifolds
The Weyl tensor has the same basic symmetries as the Riemann tensor, but its 'analogue' of the Ricci tensor is zero: = = = = The Ricci tensor, the Einstein tensor, and the traceless Ricci tensor are symmetric 2-tensors:
Since the Ricci tensor of a Riemannian metric also assigns to each p a symmetric bilinear form on T p M, the following definition is meaningful. Given a smooth manifold M and an open real interval (a, b), a Ricci flow assigns, to each t in the interval (a,b), a Riemannian metric g t on M such that ∂ / ∂t g t = −2 Ric g t.
where is the Ricci tensor, the scalar curvature, and indicates covariant differentiation. These identities are named after Luigi Bianchi, although they had been already derived by Aurel Voss in 1880. [2]
To be able to do this is necessary to include higher-order invariants including derivatives of the Riemann tensor but in the Lorentzian case, it is known that there are spacetimes which cannot be distinguished; e.g., the VSI spacetimes for which all such curvature invariants vanish and thus cannot be distinguished from flat space.