Sources of torsion in Poincarè gauge gravity

We study sources for torsion in Poincarè gauge theory in any dimension, signature, and spin. We find that symmetric kinetic terms for non-Yang-Mills bosonic fields of arbitrary rank drive torsion. Our detailed discussion of spin-3/2 Rarita-Schwinger fields shows that they source all independent parts of the torsion. We develop systematic notation for spin-(2k+1)/2 fields and find the spin tensor for arbitrary k in n ≥ 2k+1 dimensions. For k > 0 there is a novel direct coupling between torsion and spinor fields. We also cast the well-known gauge relation between the canonical and Belinfante-Rosenfield energy tensors in terms of different choices of independent variables.