# Walker-Penrose Killing tensor in Kerr spacetime¶

This notebook demonstrates a few capabilities of SageMath in computations regarding Kerr spacetime. More precisely, it focuses on the Killing tensor $K$ found by Walker & Penrose [Commun. Math. Phys. 18, 265 (1970)]. This notebook makes use of SageMath tools developed through the SageManifolds project.

NB: a version of SageMath at least equal to 8.2 is required to run this notebook:

In [1]:
version()

Out[1]:
'SageMath version 8.3, Release Date: 2018-08-03'

First we set up the notebook to display mathematical objects using LaTeX rendering:

In [2]:
%display latex


To speed up the computations, we ask for running them in parallel on 8 threads:

In [3]:
Parallelism().set(nproc=8)


## Spacetime manifold¶

We declare the Kerr spacetime (or more precisely the Boyer-Lindquist domain of Kerr spacetime) as a 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold:

In [4]:
M = Manifold(4, 'M', latex_name=r'\mathcal{M}', structure='Lorentzian')
print(M)

4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M


Let us declare the Boyer-Lindquist coordinates via the method chart(), the argument of which is a string expressing the coordinates names, their ranges (the default is $(-\infty,+\infty)$) and their LaTeX symbols:

In [5]:
BL.<t,r,th,ph> = M.chart(r't r:(0,+oo) th:(0,pi):\theta ph:(0,2*pi):\phi')
print(BL) ; BL

Chart (M, (t, r, th, ph))

Out[5]:
In [6]:
BL[0], BL[1]

Out[6]:

## Metric tensor

The 2 parameters $m$ and $a$ of the Kerr spacetime are declared as symbolic variables:

In [7]:
var('m, a', domain='real')

Out[7]:

We get the (yet undefined) spacetime metric by

In [8]:
g = M.metric()


The metric is set by its components in the coordinate frame associated with Boyer-Lindquist coordinates, which is the current manifold's default frame:

In [9]:
rho2 = r^2 + (a*cos(th))^2
Delta = r^2 -2*m*r + a^2
g[0,0] = -(1-2*m*r/rho2)
g[0,3] = -2*a*m*r*sin(th)^2/rho2
g[1,1], g[2,2] = rho2/Delta, rho2
g[3,3] = (r^2+a^2+2*m*r*(a*sin(th))^2/rho2)*sin(th)^2
g.display()

Out[9]:

A matrix view of the components with respect to the manifold's default vector frame:

In [10]:
g[:]

Out[10]:

The list of the non-vanishing components:

In [11]:
g.display_comp()

Out[11]:

## Levi-Civita Connection

The Levi-Civita connection $\nabla$ associated with $g$:

In [12]:
nabla = g.connection() ; print(nabla)

Levi-Civita connection nabla_g associated with the Lorentzian metric g on the 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M


Let us verify that the covariant derivative of $g$ with respect to $\nabla$ vanishes identically:

In [13]:
nabla(g).display()

Out[13]:

## Killing vectors

The default vector frame on the spacetime manifold is the coordinate basis associated with Boyer-Lindquist coordinates:

In [14]:
M.default_frame() is BL.frame()

Out[14]:
In [15]:
BL.frame()

Out[15]:

Let us consider the first vector field of this frame:

In [16]:
xi = BL.frame()[0] ; xi

Out[16]:
In [17]:
print(xi)

Vector field d/dt on the 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M


The 1-form associated to it by metric duality is

In [18]:
xi_form = xi.down(g) ; xi_form.display()

Out[18]:

Its covariant derivative is

In [19]:
nab_xi = nabla(xi_form) ; print(nab_xi) ; nab_xi.display()

Tensor field of type (0,2) on the 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M

Out[19]:

Let us check that the Killing equation is satisfied:

In [20]:
nab_xi.symmetrize() == 0

Out[20]:

Similarly, let us check that $\frac{\partial}{\partial\phi}$ is a Killing vector:

In [21]:
chi = BL.frame()[3] ; chi

Out[21]:
In [22]:
nabla(chi.down(g)).symmetrize() == 0

Out[22]:

## Principal null vectors¶

We introduce the principal null vectors $k$ and $\ell$ of Kerr spacetime (see e.g. Eqs. (12.3.5) and (12.3.6) of Wald's textbook General Relativity (1984)):

In [23]:
k = M.vector_field(name='k')
k[:] = [(r^2+a^2)/(2*rho2), -Delta/(2*rho2), 0, a/(2*rho2)]
k.display()

Out[23]:
In [24]:
el = M.vector_field(name='el', latex_name=r'\ell')
el[:] = [(r^2+a^2)/Delta, 1, 0, a/Delta]
el.display()

Out[24]:

Let us check that $k$ and $\ell$ are null vectors:

In [25]:
g(k,k).expr()

Out[25]:
In [26]:
g(el,el).expr()

Out[26]:

Their scalar product is $-1$:

In [27]:
g(k,el).expr()

Out[27]:

Note that the scalar product (with respect to metric $g$) can also be computed by means of the method dot:

In [28]:
k.dot(el).expr()

Out[28]:

Let us evaluate the "acceleration" of $k$, i.e. $\nabla_k k$:

In [29]:
acc_k = nabla(k).contract(k)
acc_k.display()

Out[29]:

We check that $k$ is a pregeodesic vector, i.e. that $\nabla_k k = \kappa_k k$ for some scalar field $\kappa_k$:

In [30]:
for i in [0,1,3]:
show(acc_k[i] / k[i])

In [31]:
kappa_k = acc_k[[0]] / k[[0]]
kappa_k.display()

Out[31]:
In [32]:
acc_k == kappa_k * k

Out[32]:

Similarly let us evaluate the "acceleration" of $\ell$:

In [33]:
acc_l = nabla(el).contract(el)
acc_l.display()

Out[33]:

Hence $\ell$ is a geodesic vector.

The check that $k$ and $\ell$ do define (repeated) principal null directions is performed in this notebook.

## Walker-Penrose Killing tensor¶

We need the 1-forms associated to $k$ and $\ell$ by metric duality:

In [34]:
uk = k.down(g)
ul = el.down(g)


The Walker-Penrose Killing tensor $K$ is then formed as $$K = \rho^2 (\underline{\ell}\otimes \underline{k} + (\underline{k}\otimes \underline{\ell}) + r^2 g$$

In [35]:
K = rho2*(ul*uk+ uk*ul) + r^2*g
K.set_name('K')
print(K)

Tensor field K of type (0,2) on the 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M

In [36]:
K.display_comp()

Out[36]:
In [37]:
DK = nabla(K)
print(DK)

Tensor field nabla_g(K) of type (0,3) on the 4-dimensional Lorentzian manifold M

In [38]:
DK.display_comp()

Out[38]:

Let us check that $K$ is a Killing tensor:

In [39]:
DK.symmetrize().display()

Out[39]:

Equivalently, we may write, using index notation:

In [40]:
DK['_(abc)'].display()

Out[40]: