Projective differential geometry and geodesic conservation laws in general relativity. II: Conservation laws (Q760929): Difference between revisions

[For part I see the preceding review.] We examine the geodesic conservation laws associated with the projective actions discussed in our earlier paper with the same overall title. Using the Cartan formalism, a one-to-one correspondence between a class of these actions and all geodesic conservation laws is possible. In particular there is a natural geometric interpretation of Killing tensors. Homothetic motions are shown to correspond to conserved quantities on all geodesics (not just null ones). The same approach identifies homothetic Killing tensors and a universal quadratic first integral which reduces to the conformal Killing tensor case on null geodesics.