A Systematic Construction of Kastor-Traschen Currents and their Extensions to Generic Powers of Curvature

Abstract

Kastor and Traschen constructed totally anti-symmetric conserved currents that are linear in the Riemann curvature in spacetimes admitting Killing-Yano tensors. The construction does not refer to any field equations and is built on the algebraic and differential symmetries of the Riemann tensor as well as on the Killing-Yano equation. Here we give a systematic generalization of their work and find divergence-free currents that are built from the powers of the curvature tensor. A rank-4 divergence-free tensor that is constructed from the powers of the curvature tensor plays a major role here and it comes from the Lanczos-Lovelock theory.