Third Rank Killing Tensors in General Relativity. The (1 + 1)-dimensional Case

Abstract

Third rank Killing tensors in (1 +1)-dimensional geometries are investigated andclassified. It is found that a necessary and sufficientcondition for such a geometry to admit a third rankKilling tensor can always be formulated as a quadratic PDE, oforder three or lower, in a Kahler type potential for themetric. This is in contrast to the case of first andsecond rank Killing tensors for which the integrability condition is a linear PDE. The motivation for studying higher rank Killing tensors in (1 +1)-geometries, is the fact that exact solutions of theEinstein equations are often associated with a first orsecond rank Killing tensor symmetry in the geodesicflow formulation of the dynamics. This is in particulartrue for the many models of interest for which thisformulation is (1 + 1)-dimensional, where just one additional constant of motion suffices forcomplete integrability. We show that new exact solutionscan be found by classifying geometries admitting higherrank Killing tensors.