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definition. Spin group [sommer2013geometric] [spin-0005]

The Clifford group \(\Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}}\) of a Clifford algebra \(\mathcal {C}_{p, q}\) is defined as \[ \Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}}:=\left \{s \in \mathcal {C}_{p, q} \mid \forall x \in \mathbb {R}_{p, q}: s x \hat {s}^{-1} \in \mathbb {R}_{p, q}\right \} . \] From that definition we get immediately \[ \Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}} \times \mathbb {R}_{p, q} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}_{p, q} ; \quad (s, x) \mapsto s x \hat {s}^{-1} \] as the operation of the Clifford group \(\Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}}\) on \(\mathbb {R}_{p, q}\). \(\Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}}\) is a multiple cover of the orthogonal group \(O(p, q)\). However, it is still unnecessarily large. Therefore, we first reduce \(\Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}}\) to a two-fold cover of \(O(p, q)\) by defining the so-called Pin group \[ \operatorname {Pin}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}):=\left \{s \in \Gamma _{\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}} \mid s \tilde {s}= \pm 1\right \} . \] The even elements of \(\operatorname {Pin}(p, q)\) form the spin group \[ \operatorname {Spin}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}):=\operatorname {Pin}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}) \cap \mathcal {C}_{p, q}^{+} \] which is a double cover of the special orthogonal group \(S O(p, q)\). Finally, those elements of \(\operatorname {Spin}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q})\) with Clifford norm equal 1 form a further subgroup \[ \operatorname {Spin}_{+}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}):=\{s \in \operatorname {Spin}(\mathrm {p}, \mathrm {q}) \mid s \tilde {s}=1\} \] that covers \(\mathrm {SO}_{+}(p, q)\) twice. Thereby, \(\mathrm {SO}_{+}(p, q)\) is the connected component of the identity of \(O(p, q)\).