Gravity with torsion as deformed BF theory

Abstract We study a family of (possibly non topological) deformations of BF theory for the Lie algebra obtained by quadratic extension of so ( 3 , 1 ) by an orthogonal module. The resulting theory, called quadratically extended General Relativity (qeGR), is shown to be classically equivalent to certain models of gravity with dynamical torsion. The classical equivalence is shown to promote to a stronger notion of equivalence within the Batalin–Vilkovisky formalism. In particular, both Palatini–Cartan gravity and a deformation thereof by a dynamical torsion term, called (quadratic) generalised Holst theory, are recovered from the standard Batalin–Vilkovisky formulation of qeGR by elimination of generalised auxiliary fields.