English

Conserved currents for electromagnetic fields in the Kerr spacetime

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-09-15 v3

Abstract

We construct a variety of conserved currents for test electromagnetic fields on a Kerr background. Our procedure, which involves the symplectic product for electromagnetism and symmetry operators, generates the conserved currents given by Andersson, B\"ackdahl, and Blue (2015), as well as a new conserved current. These currents reduce to the sum of (positive powers of) the Carter constants of photons in the geometric optics limit, and generalize the current for scalar fields discovered by Carter (1977) involving the Killing tensor. We furthermore show that the fluxes of our new current through null infinity and the horizon are finite.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.08645,
  title  = {Conserved currents for electromagnetic fields in the Kerr spacetime},
  author = {Alexander M. Grant and Éanna É. Flanagan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.08645},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

25 pages; v2: fixed typo, added clarification; v3: matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:48:17.765Z