Properties of Bel currents

Abstract

The Bel tensor is divergence-free in some important cases leading to the existence of conserved currents associated to Killing vectors analogously to those of the energy-momentum tensor. When the divergence of the Bel tensor does not vanish one can study the interchange of some quantities between the gravitational and other fields obtaining mixed total conserved currents. Nevertheless, the Bel currents are shown to be conserved (independently of the matter content) if the Killing vectors satisfy some very general conditions. These properties are similar to some very well known statements for the energy-momentum tensor.