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Background:

After reading about Carter constant and symmetries in GR, I became interested in Killing tensors.

I tried reading this paper by Alan Barnes, Brian Edgar and Raffaele Rani, discussing conformal Killing tensors. I have some trouble understanding the crux of the paper.

Question:

  • Is there a general way to construct Killing tensors, if the Killing vectors are known?

  • How would I do this?

  • Are there any Killing tensors that can not be constructed from Killing vectors?

Initial guess/motivation for the question:

Initially, I thought Killing tensors could just be formed via $K_{\mu \nu}=k_\mu k'_\nu$, where $K_{\mu \nu}$=Killing tensor, $k_\mu,k'_\nu$=Killing vectors. After reading the above paper, I am no longer sure. The paper discusses conformal Killing tensors and vectors, which may be the source of my confusion.

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OTH
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  • I'm now re-reading the article in hopes of learning a bit more. – OTH Oct 29 '15 at 06:59
  • This is a short answer

    But basically Killing tensors can be constructed at least via:

    $K_{\mu \nu}=k_\mu k_\nu$

    This satisfies the Killing tensor equation:

    $K_{(\mu \nu;c)}=0$

    Just by using the Killing vector equation: $k_{(\mu;c)}=0$

     – OTH Oct 29 '15 at 07:19

1 Answers1

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Killing tensors created by just product of two Killing vectors is only in the trivial case. In a non-trivial case this is not possible such as in finding the Carter constants. This is all I know as I'm also a beginner.

Jyothish Jose
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