Paper detail

On Conserved Quantities for the Free Motion of Particles with Spin

In the early 80's, R. Rüdiger published a pair of articles in which it was found the most general conserved charges associated to the motion of particles with spin moving in curved spacetime. In particular, it was shown that besides the well-known conserved quantity associated to Killing vectors, it is also possible to have another conserved quantity that is linear in the spin of the particle if the spacetime admits a Killing-Yano tensor. However, in these papers it was proved that in order for this new scalar to be conserved two obscure conditions involving the Killing-Yano tensor and the curvature must be obeyed. In the present paper we try to shed light over these conditions and end up proving that this conserved quantity is useless for most physically relevant spacetimes. Notably, for particles moving in vacuum (Einstein spacetimes) this conserved scalar constructed with the Killing-Yano tensor will not help on the integration of the equations of motion. Moreover, we prove that, as a consequence of these obscure conditions, the Killing-Yano tensor must be covariantly constant.