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Affine symmetry, geodesics, and homogeneous spacetimes
General Relativity and Gravitation (2018)
  • David Maughan
  • Charles G Torre
Abstract
We show that the conservation laws for the geodesic equation which are associated to affine symmetries can be obtained from symmetries of the Lagrangian for affinely parametrized geodesics according to Noether’s theorem, in contrast to claims found in the literature. In particular, using Aminova’s classification of affine motions of Lorentzian manifolds, we show in detail how affine motions define generalized symmetries of the geodesic Lagrangian. We compute all infinitesimal proper affine symmetries and the corresponding geodesic conservation laws for all homogeneous solutions to the Einstein field equations in four spacetime dimensions with each of the following energy–momentum contents: vacuum, cosmological constant, perfect fluid, pure radiation, and homogeneous electromagnetic fields.

Keywords
  • General Relativity,
  • Einstein Equations,
  • Geodesic Equation,
  • Noether Theorem,
  • Homogeneous Spacetimes,
  • Affine symmetry
Publication Date
July 28, 2018
DOI
10.1007/s10714-018-2422-0
Citation Information
David Maughan and Charles G Torre. "Affine symmetry, geodesics, and homogeneous spacetimes" General Relativity and Gravitation Vol. 50 (2018) p. 102
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/charles_torre/94/
Creative Commons license
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC International License.