Seminar: Energy (non-)conservation and an alternative conserved charge in a curved spacetime (general relativity)
Wednesday, 29. March 2023 // 14.00
Research Training Group 2575 “Rethinking Quantum Field Theory”, HU Berlin
Zum Großen Windkanal 2,
12489 Berlin
IRIS Adlershof, Raum 1.221
Prof. Dr. Sinya Aoki
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto, Japan
In this talk, we revisit an issue on the definition of energy in a curved spacetime.
For a system invariant under time-translation, energy is defined as its Noether charge and thus dynamically conserved. For a curved spacetime, however, the energy is not necessary to be conserved since the time-translation invariant is broken in general. Thus, historically, peoples included contributions from gravitational fields to make a total energy conserved, however, by giving up some properties, such as Einstein’s energy from his pseudo-tensor (giving up the general covariance) and quasi-local energies (giving up a local definition of energy), which, after some debates, have been exclusively used so far in general relativity.
