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Published January 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Metadata-only

All identically conserved gravitational tensors are metric variations of invariant actions

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Brandeis University

Abstract

I prove an old unsolved conjecture, the hard – necessary – part of its obvious sufficiency, namely that all identically conserved symmetric 2-tensors are necessarily metric variations of invariant actions, thus sparing the world more alternative gravity theories. The proof is reasonably simple, if perhaps a "physicist's".

Copyright and License

© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgement

I thank my old collaborator, Y. Pang for useful correspondence, a referee for insisting on better details, and J. Franklin for tech help.

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics , Award Number de-sc0011632.

Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2208.06731 (arXiv)

Funding

United States Department of Energy
DE-SC0011632

Dates

Accepted
2022-11-02
Available
2022-11-09
Available online
Available
2022-11-26
Version of record

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Caltech groups
Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published