Remarks on pure spinors

Abstract

General remarks on the significance of spinors are followed by a brief description of spinor connections on low-dimensional spheres and their interpretation as gauge configurations. Cartan's notion of pure spinors is related to the general problem of classification of orbits of the spin group in projective spinor space. There is a nontrivial bundle of pure spinor directions over the conformal compactification of any space with a metric of suitable signature. In higher dimensions, pure spinors introduce natural nonlinearities and lead to topologically nontrivial configurations. It is shown how the constraint defining pure spinors may induce a ‘mass term’ in the Weyl equation for such spinors in a space of signature (3, 4).