The Lanczos potential in the Plebanski paradigm of gravity

Abstract: We present a new Plebanski formulation of General Relativity. The key difference is that we work with a gauge vector field derived from the Lanczos potential of the Weyl tensor. We show that, on shell, the gauge vector field encodes all nontrivial gravitational degrees of freedom and, in a suitable Lorentz gauge, Bianchi identities ensure that this gauge vector field satisfies a source-free wave equation for Ricci-flat spacetimes. This description suggests new ways of interpreting the true geometrical degrees of freedom with applications in both classical and quantum gravity.