Real spinor bundles and real Lipschitz structures

Abstract

We obtain the topological obstructions to existence of a bundle of irreducible real Clifford modules over a pseudo-Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$ of arbitrary dimension and signature and prove that bundles of Clifford modules are associated to so-called real Lipschitz structures. The latter give a generalization of spin structures based on certain groups which we call real Lipschitz groups. In the fiberwise-irreducible case, we classify the latter in all dimensions and signatures. As a simple application, we show that the supersymmetry generator of eleven-dimensional supergravity in "mostly plus" signature can be interpreted as a global section of a bundle of irreducible Clifford modules if and $\textit{only if}$ the underlying eleven-manifold is orientable and spin.