Helicity and spin conservation in linearized gravity

Abstract

The duality-symmetric, Maxwell-like, formulation of linearized gravity introduced by Barnett (New J Phys 16, 2014) is used to generalize the conservation laws for helicity, the spin part of angular momentum, and spin-flux, to the case of linearized gravity. These conservation laws have been shown to follow from the conservation property of the helicity array, an analog of Lipkin’s zilch tensor. The analog of the helicity array for linearized gravity is constructed and is shown to be conserved.