Gravitational Goldstone fields from affine gauge theory

In order to facilitate the application of standard renormalization techniques, gravitation should be described, in the pure connection formalism, as a Yang-Mills theory of a certain spacetime group, say the Poincare or the affine group. This embodies the translational as well as the linear connection. However, the coframe is not the standard Yang-Mills-type gauge field of the translations, since it lacks the inhomogeneous gradient term in the gauge transformations. By explicitly restoring this hidden piece within the framework of nonlinear realizations, the usual geometrical interpretation of the dynamical theory becomes possible, and in addition one can avoid the metric or coframe degeneracy which would otherwise interfere with the integrations within the path integral. We claim that nonlinear realizations provide the general mathematical scheme for the foundation of gauge theories of spacetime symmetries. When applied to construct the Yang-Mills theory of the affine group, tetrads become identified with nonlinear translational connections; the anholonomic metric no longer constitutes an independent gravitational potential, since its degrees of freedom reveal a correspondence to eliminateable Goldstone bosons. This may be an important advantage for quantization.