Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 336
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16336-7

Regular Article

Lanczos potential for some non-vacuum spacetimes

Department of Mathematics, Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar, India

^* e-mail: ah_hasmani@spuvvn.edu

Received: 30 July 2016
Accepted: 5 September 2016
Published online: 26 September 2016

Abstract

The Lanczos potential is a general relativity analogue of potential in electrodynamics. This potential can be obtained by solving Weyl-Lanczos relations. This computation is easy in the case of vacuum spacetimes and/or spacetimes of particular Petrov type, while obtaining the Lanczos potential for arbitrary spacetime is very difficult. In this paper, we have obtained the Lanczos potential for non-vacuum spacetimes: Vaidya spacetime and Van Stockum spacetime (which is not of any Petrov type).