1. Introduction
General Relativity (GR) is an intriguing space, time, and gravitation theory. In this theory, Einstein proposed that the presence of matter and energy induces the curvature of spacetime. Mathematically, GR is described by a set of ten interconnected nonlinear partial differential equations, known as Einstein’s field equations (EFEs) [
1]:
where
,
,
, and
correspond to Einstein, Ricci, energy-momentum, and metric tensors, respectively.
R denotes the Ricci scalar, while
k defines the gravitational coupling between geometry and matter. Solving EFEs for exact solutions is a huge challenge because of their nonlinear nature. The literature contains only a limited number of physically significant exact solutions of the EFEs. The Eq. (
1) represents the covariant form of EFEs, which can also be written in a contravariant form as:
Although these equations appear simple, they are highly nonlinear and pose significant challenges in finding solutions. However, some physically interesting and exact solutions of EFEs are studied in [
1,
2,
3].
Spacetime symmetries are crucial for determining the exact solutions of EFEs and understanding their physical implications. For instance, spherical symmetry plays a significant role in deriving the Schwarzschild solution and explaining phenomena like the absence of gravitational radiation in a pulsating spherical star. These symmetries are characterized by specific vector fields that possess preserving properties, such as preserving spacetime geodesics, the metric tensor, the curvature tensor, or the energy-momentum tensor.
Mathematically, a smooth vector field
on a spacetime manifold
is termed as a matter collineation if it satisfies the condition:
where
stands for the Lie derivative operator,
is a collineation vector, and
is the contravariant form of stress-energy tensor. In its explicit form, the preceding equation can be written as:
In [
4], Sharif classified cylindrically symmetric static spacetimes using MCs, considering both degenerate and nondegenerate stress-energy tensors. In the case of a nondegenerate stress-energy tensor, the dimension of the Lie algebra turns out to be three, four, five, six, seven, or ten. In the case of a degenerate stress-energy tensor, a three-, four-, five- or ten-dimensional Lie algebra was obtained. In 2007, Sharif [
5] studied MCs for plane-symmetric spacetimes. In this research, the author specifically examined the degenerate case of the stress-energy tensor and identified three exciting issues. The results of these cases led to a finite-dimensional group of MCs with dimensions four, six, and ten. Four obtained MCs corresponded to isometries, while the rest were proper MCs. In [
6], Camci and Sahin classified Bianchi type-II spacetimes according to their MCs. In the nondegenerate stress-energy tensor, they derived a finite-dimensional Lie algebra of MCs, specifically, of dimensions three, four, or five. For the case when the stress-energy tensor was degenerate, they mainly obtained an infinite-dimensional Lie algebra. However, it was concluded that, in certain cases, the dimension of the Lie algebra could be three, four, or five.
In 2003, Sharif [
7] classified static plane-symmetric spacetimes based on the covariant form of the stress-energy tensor. For the nondegenerate case of the stress-energy tensor, the author determined four, five, six, seven, or ten independent MCs. Among these, four were isometries, while the rest were proper MCs. In the case of a degenerate stress-energy tensor, three interesting cases were discussed, revealing a finite-dimensional group of MCs. In these instances, the dimension of the Lie algebra was either four, six, or ten - four of them being isometries and the remaining representing proper matter collineations.
Camci and Sharif [
8] examined MCs for Bianchi types I, III and Kantowski-Sachs spacetimes in both cases where the stress-energy tensor is degenerate and nondegenerate. In the case of a nondegenerate energy-momentum tensor, the dimension of Lie algebra turned out to be 4, 6 or 10, while the degenerate case of
gave an infinite-dimensional Lie algebra. Camci [
9] studied a complete classification of Bianchi type V spacetimes based on their matter collineations. In the majority of cases, the author obtained an infinite number of MCs for these spacetimes when the energy-momentum tensor is supposed to be degenerate, whereas the dimension of the Lie algebra of MCs was acquired to be four, five, six, or seven when the energy-momentum tensor is nondegenerate. The classification of some other spacetimes via matter collineations can be viewed in [
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18].
In 2007, Sharif and Ismaeel [
19] classified spherically symmetric spacetimes via MCs in three different ways by considering the energy-momentum tensor in the covariant (
), contravariant (
) and mixed (
) forms. The authors compared their results of these three cases and proved that they are not equivalent, in general. The present research aims to employ the same idea to investigate MCs for static plane-symmetric spacetimes by considering energy-momentum tensor in contravariant and mixed forms. The MCs for the same spacetimes for covariant energy-momentum tensor have already been investigated in [
7]
In Sec. 2, we find MCs for the mentioned spacetimes by considering the energy-momentum tensor in its contravariant form, while Sec. 3 presents MCs of these spacetimes for mixed forms of energy-momentum tensor. The same section also presents a comparison of the obtained results with those of the contravariant form of the energy-momentum tensor. The last section presents a summary of the present work.
2. MCs for Contravariant Energy-Momentum Tensor
The metric of static plane-symmetric spacetimes is expressed as [
7]:
where
A and
B are the arbitrary functions of
x only. The above metric exhibits a minimum of four Killing vectors, given by:
The non-vanishing Ricci tensor components for the above metric are:
where the primes represent the derivative of the metric functions with respect to
x. The Ricci scalar
R for the static plane symmetric spacetime can be calculated using
, so that:
Substituting (
7) and (
8) in Eq. (
1), we get the covariant stress-energy tensor components as:
From the above covariant stress-energy tensor, the components of the contravariant stress-energy tensor can be obtained by the relation
and hence:
From these values of the contravariant stress-energy tensor, the components of mixed energy-momentum tensor can be obtained as
so that:
Using the values from (
10) in (
4), we get the following ten MC equations:
where the components of the vector field
X generating MCs are represented by
and the commas in the subscripts represent partial derivatives with respect to spacetime coordinates. In the following sections, we solve these equations for degenerate and non-degenerate contravariant energy-momentum tensor, to obtain the explicit form of MCs for static plane-symmetric spacetimes.
2.1. MCs for Non-degenerate
In the case where the contravariant stress-energy tensor is non-degenerate, that is
it follows that
and
implying that none of the contravariant stress-energy tensor components can equals zero. Integrating the system of Eqs. ()-(), we have obtained the following solution of the MC equations in the form of unknown functions, dependent solely on
t and
x:
Here
,
,
and
represent arbitrary constants. Upon substituting the above values of
, for
into the system of Eqs. ()-(), it is observed that six out of ten equations are satisfied identically, resulting in the vanishing of the constant
However, the remaining four equations yield the following integrability conditions that enforce particular constraints on
:
Solving these integrability conditions allows us to derive the final expression for the vector field X that generates MCs. However, due to the highly nonlinear nature of these equations, it is impossible to solve them in a general manner. Hence, we consider different conditions on the derivatives of the contravariant stress-energy tensor components, leading to eight distinct cases as follows:
(I) and (II) and
(III) and (IV) and
(V) and (VI) and
(VII) and (VIII) and
We have solved Eqs. (
23)-() for each of the aforementioned cases, giving the final form of MCs. We omit to write the basic calculations and present the results obtained for these eight cases in
Table 1. In some cases, we have obtained a maximum (of ten) matter collineations, consisting of four basic Killing vectors and six additional matter collineations. In the remaining cases, the number of matter collineations turned out to be four, where all of these matter collineations are the same as the minimum Killing vectors of the spacetime under consideration.
2.2. MCs for Degenerate
When the contravariant form of stress-energy tensor is degenerate, that is then one of the components and must be zero, and hence we have the following six possibilities:
(D1) and (D2) and
(D3) and (D4)
(D5) and (D6) and
We have solved the set of MC equations, Eqs. ()-(), for all the above six cases, and as a result, we have obtained the components of the vector field
X involving arbitrary functions, showing that the dimension of the group of MCs is infinite in all these cases.
Table 2 presents the MCs obtained for the six cases.
4. Conclusion
In this article, we have investigated matter collineations of static plane-symmetric spacetimes. We specifically examined MCs for contravariant and mixed forms of the stress-energy tensor, while MCs for the same spacetimes for the covariant energy-momentum tensor were already explored in Ref. [
7]. The MC equations are solved for both degenerate and non-degenerate cases. Our findings indicate that for the degenerate stress-energy tensor in its contravariant and mixed form, the Lie algebra of MCs exhibits an infinite dimension due to unknown functions in the components of the vector field
. However, the author of Ref. [
7] obtained finite and infinite MCs for a degenerate energy-momentum tensor in its covariant form.
On the other hand, for nondegenerate stress-energy tensor in contravariant form, we have observed that the Lie algebra has finite dimensions, typically four or ten. However, in Ref. [
7], the author obtained the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7- and 10-dimensional algebra of MCs for the nondegenerate stress-energy tensor in its covariant form. Moreover, when considering the nondegenerate mixed form of the stress-energy tensor, the dimension of the Lie algebra is found to be infinite, while for the nondegenerate contravariant form of the stress-energy tensor the author of [
7] obtained a 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, and 10-dimensional algebra of MCs.
Summarizing the results, we can say that like in the case of static spherically symmetric spacetimes, the algebras of MCs for static plane-symmetric spacetimes are also of different dimensions for different forms of energy-momentum tensor. Investigating the same comparative study for some other spacetimes is under consideration and will appear elsewhere.