Non-conservation of Carter in black hole spacetimes

Abstract

Freely falling point particles in the vicinity of Kerr black holes are subject to a conservation law, that of their Carter constant. We consider the conjecture that this conservation law is a special case of a more general conservation law, valid for arbitrary processes obeying local energy momentum conservation. Under some fairly general assumptions we prove that the conjecture is false: there is no conservation law for conserved stress-energy tensors on the Kerr background that reduces to conservation of Carter for a single point particle.