Carter's constant and superintegrability

Abstract

Carter's constant is a nontrivial conserved quantity of motion of a particle moving in stationary axisymmetric spacetime. In the version of the theorem originally given by Carter, due to the presence of two Killing vectors, the system effectively has two degrees of freedom. We propose an extension to the first version of Carter's theorem to a system having three degrees of freedom to find two functionally independent Carter-like integrals of motion. We further generalize the theorem to a dynamical system with [Formula: see text] degrees of freedom. We further study the implications of Carter's constant to superintegrability and present a different approach to probe a superintegrable system. Our formalism gives another viewpoint to a superintegrable system using the simple observation of separable Hamiltonian according to Carter's criteria. We then give some examples by constructing some two-dimensional superintegrable systems based on this idea and also show that all three-dimensional simple classical superintegrable potentials are also Carter separable.