Classification of local conservation laws of Maxwell's equations

Abstract

A complete and explicit classification of all independent local conservation laws of Maxwell's equations in four dimensional Minkowski space is given. Besides the elementary linear conservation laws, and the well-known quadratic conservation laws associated to the conserved stress-energy and zilch tensors, there are also chiral quadratic conservation laws which are associated to a new conserved tensor. The chiral conservation laws possess odd parity under the electric-magnetic duality transformation of Maxwell's equations, in contrast to the even parity of the stress-energy and zilch conservation laws. The main result of the classification establishes that every local conservation law of Maxwell's equations is equivalent to a linear combination of the elementary conservation laws, the stress-energy and zilch conservation laws, the chiral conservation laws, and their higher order extensions obtained by replacing the electromagnetic field tensor by its repeated Lie derivatives with respect to the conformal Killing vectors on Minkowski space. The classification is based on spinorial methods and provides a direct, unified characterization of the conservation laws in terms of Killing spinors.