General relativity as a (constrained) Yang-Mills theory and a novel gravity with torsion

We show that General Relativity (GR) with cosmological constant may be formulated as a rather simple constrained SO(D - 1; 2) (or SO( D; 1))- Yang-Mills (YM) theory. Furthermore, the spin connections of the Cartan-Einstein formulation for GR appear as solutions of a genuine SO( D - 1; 1)- YM. We also present a theory of gravity with torsion as the most natural extension of this result. The theory comes out to be strictly an YM-theory upon relaxation of a suitable constraint. This work sets out to enforce the close connection between YM theories and GR by means of an alternative construction.