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Perturbations Of Gravitational Instantons, Charles G. Torre

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Ashtekar's spinorial formulation of general relativity is used to study perturbations of gravitational instantons corresponding to finite-action solutions of the Euclidean Einstein equations (with a nonzero cosmological constant) possessing an anti-self-dual Weyl curvature tensor. It is shown that, with an appropriate "on-shell" form of infinitesimal gauge transformations, the space of solutions to the linearized instanton equation can be described in terms of an elliptic complex; the cohomology of the complex defines gauge-inequivalent perturbations. Using this elliptic complex we prove that there are no nontrivial solutions to the linearized instanton equation on conformally anti-self-dual Einstein spaces with a positive cosmological constant. …