Homothetic Symmetries of Static Cylindrically Symmetric Spacetimes—A Rif Tree Approach

Abstract

In this paper, we find all static, cylindrically symmetric spacetime metrics admitting homothetic symmetries. For this purpose, first we analyze the homothetic symmetry equations by an algorithm developed in Maple which gives all possible static, cylindrically symmetric metrics that may possess proper homothetic symmetry. After that, we have solved the homothetic symmetry equations for all these metrics to get the final form of homothetic symmetry vector fields. Comparing the obtained results with those of direct integration technique, it is observed that the Rif tree approach not only recovers the metrics already found by direct integration technique, but it also produces some new metrics.