Gravitational currents and charges from conformal Killing-Yano tensors
Abstract
We construct a set of higher-form conserved currents on spacetimes admitting conformal Killing-Yano tensors. We find relations between these currents that allow the charge given by integrating one of these currents over a region to be re-expressed as an integral of a covariant quantity over the boundary. In many cases, only a non-covariant form of the boundary integral was previously known. For a special class of these currents the conservation does not rely on field equations, so they give conserved topological charges in any gravitational theory. We discuss the relation of our currents to the Komar current and derive several new properties of conformal Killing-Yano tensors. We study a number of applications of our construction to charges of black hole solutions of Einstein-Maxwell theory, and D-brane solutions of type II supergravity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.16723,
title = {Gravitational currents and charges from conformal Killing-Yano tensors},
author = {Chris Hull and Ulf Lindström and Maxwell L. Velásquez Cotini Hutt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.16723},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
24 pages + appendices; v2: references added