Killing-Yano tensors are natural generalizations of Killing vectors to arbitrary rank antisymmetric tensor fields. It was recently shown that Killing-Yano tensors lead to conserved gravitational charges, called Yano-Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (Y-ADM) charges. These new charges are interesting because they measure e.g. the mass density of a $p$-brane, rather than the total ADM mass which may be infinite. In this paper, we show that the spinorial techniques used by Witten, in his proof of the positive energy theorem, may be straightforwardly extended to study the positivity properties of the Y-ADM mass density for $p$-brane spacetimes. Although the resulting formalism is quite similar to the ADM case, we show that establishing a positivity bound in the higher rank Y-ADM case requires imposing a condition on the Weyl tensor in addition to an energy condition. We find appropriate energy conditions for spacetimes that are conformally flat or algebraically special, and for spacetimes that have an exact Killing vector along the brane. Finally we discuss our expression for the Y-ADM mass density from the Hamiltonian point of view.

• Received 3 November 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.71.104015