Description
We study the primary constraint structure of newer general relativity, a gravity theory based on a torsionless teleparallel geometry. The gravitational action consists of a scalar built from quadratic combinations of the nonmetricity tensor with arbitrary coefficients in the Lagrangian. We perform a 3+1 decomposition of the Lagrangian and compute the canonical momenta associated with the metric. We characterize the primary constraints coming from the metric conjugate momenta by analyzing when the map between momenta and velocities becomes non-invertible, and organize the outcome through a fully nonlinear decomposition into scalar, vector and tensor sectors. We compare our results with others found in the literature.