Spacetime topology. I: Chirality and the third Stiefel-Whitney class (Q5959213)

The authors present a physical interpretation of the third Stiefel Whitney class of a space time model. Namely, they show that this class is related to chirality. First they present some facts about the relationship of the space time orientability and the triviality of the first Stiefel Whitney class and the existence of the spinor structure and the triviality of the second Stiefel Whitney class. Next they consider the chiral (Weyl) spinors and show that the chirality is globally defined if and only if \(w_3\) is trivial.