Noether charge formalism for Weyl transverse gravity

Abstract

Weyl transverse gravity is a gravitational theory that is invariant under transverse diffeomorphisms and Weyl transformations. It is characterised by having the same classical solutions as general relativity while solving some of its issues with the cosmological constant. In this work, we first find the Noether currents and charges corresponding to local symmetries of Weyl transverse gravity as well as a prescription for the symplectic form. We then employ these results to derive the first law of black hole mechanics in Weyl transverse gravity (both in vacuum and in the presence of a perfect fluid), identifying the total energy, the total angular momentum, and the Wald entropy of black holes. We further obtain the first law and Smarr formula for Schwarzschild-anti-de Sitter and pure de Sitter spacetimes, discussing the contributions of the varying cosmological constant, which naturally appear in Weyl transverse gravity. Lastly, we derive the first law of causal diamonds in vacuum.

Vanishing Noether Current in Weyl Invariant Gravities

“…Several years ago, in Ref. [2] it was pointed out that the Noether current associated with the Weyl symmetry in a Weyl invariant scalar-tensor gravity [3] vanishes identically by both a direct evaluation and the second Noether theorem [4,5], and afterwards it was shown that the same result holds for conformal gravity by dealing with it as a gauge natural theory [6], the unimodular gravity [7] and the Weyl transverse gravity [8,9] by a direct calculation.…”