Concircular vector fields on Lorentzian manifold of Bianchi type-I spacetimes

Abstract

Our aim in this paper is to obtain concircular vector fields (CVFs) on the Lorentzian manifold of Bianchi type-I spacetimes. For this purpose, two different sets of coupled partial differential equations comprising ten equations each are obtained. The first ten equations, known as conformal Killing equations are solved completely and components of conformal Killing vector fields (CKVFs) are obtained in different possible cases. These CKVFs are then substituted into second set of ten differential equations to obtain CVFs. It comes out that Bianchi type-I spacetimes admit four-, five-, six-, seven- or 15-dimensional CVFs for particular choices of the metric functions. In many cases, the CKVFs of a particular metric are same as CVFs while there exists few cases where proper CKVFs are not CVFs.