Energy-Momentum Distribution: A Crucial Problem in General Relativity

Abstract

This paper is aimed to elaborate the problem of energy-momentum in General Relativity. In this connection, we use the prescriptions of Einstein, Landau-Lifshitz, Papapetrou and Möller to compute the energy-momentum densities for two exact solutions of Einstein field equations. The spacetimes under consideration are the non-null Einstein-Maxwell solutions and the singularity-free cosmological model. The electromagnetic generalization of the Gödel solution and the Gödel metric become special cases of the non-null Einstein-Maxwell solutions. It turns out that these prescriptions do not provide consistent results for any of these spacetimes. These inconsistence results verify the well-known proposal that the idea of localization does not follow the lines of pseudo-tensorial construction but instead follows from the energy-momentum tensor itself. These differences can also be understood with the help of the Hamiltonian approach.

28 pages, accepted for publication in Int. J. Mod. Phys. A