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The IUP Journal of Physics :
A Survey of Lanczos Potential
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We give a short survey of the properties of Lanczos potential, and we mention how this potential is relevant for the derivation of the Weyl curvature tensor; we give some useful examples that have been already computed elsewhere.

It was in 1962 when Cornelius Lanczos (1962) made the important observation about that for any geometry, the Weyl conformal curvature tensor, can be written as the covariant derivative of a third rank tensor Labc, later called the Lanczos potential. All attempts to generalize this result for the case of the general curvature tensor of Riemann have failed. Nevertheless, the Einstein equations can be formulated in Jordan form and written in terms of the Weyl tensor. Lanczos proved that the existence of a potential for the general Riemann curvature tensor is not possible and later Bampi and Caviglia gave a completely different proof of this point (Bampi and Cavaglia, 1983). However, they did not give a method to calculate the potential Labc. Afterwards, Novello and Velloso (1987) showed a method to compute the Lanczos potential tensor

 
 
 

Survey of Lanczos Potential, Weyl curvature tensor, general curvature tensor, Einstein equations, Lanczos potential tensor, gravitational waves, electromagnetic potential vector, tensorial mechanism, gravitational field, Kasner space-time.