Killing tensors and photon surfaces in foliated spacetimes

Abstract

We present a purely geometric method for constructing a rank-two Killing tensor in a spacetime with a codimension-one foliation that lifts the trivial Killing tensors from slices to the entire manifold. The resulting Killing tensor can be nontrivial. A deep connection is found between the existence of such a Killing tensor and the presence of generalized photon surfaces in spacetime with two Killing vector fields. This technique generates Killing tensors in a purely algebraic way, without solving differential equations. The use of our method is demonstrated for Kerr and Kerr-Newman-NUT-AdS metrics and Kerr-NUT-AdS multicharge gauged supergravity solution.