Permutation Symbol

The permutation symbol is a three-index object sometimes called the LeviCivita symbol, Levi-Civita density, alternating tensor, or signature. It is defined by

There are several common notations for the symbol, the first of which uses the usual Greek epsilon character , the second of which uses the curly variant , and the third of which uses a Latin lower case . The symbol can also be interpreted as a tensor, in which case it is called the permutation tensor.

The permutation symbol satisfies

where

is the Kronecker delta.

The symbol can be defined as the scalar triple product of unit vectors in a right-handed coordinate system,

The symbol can be generalized to an arbitrary number of elements, in which case the permutation symbol is , where is the number of

transpositions of pairs of elements (i.e., permutation inversions) that must be composed to build up the permutation . This type of symbol arises in computation of determinants of matrices. The number of permutations on symbols having signature is , which is also the number of permutations having signature .