Nijenhuis Integrability for Killing Tensors

Abstract

The fundamental tool in the classification of orthogonal coordinate systems in which the Hamilton-Jacobi and other prominent equations can be solved by a separation of variables are second order Killing tensors which satisfy the Nijenhuis integrability conditions. The latter are a system of three non-linear partial differential equations. We give a simple and completely algebraic proof that for a Killing tensor the third and most complicated of these equations is redundant. This considerably simplifies the classification of orthogonal separation coordinates on arbitrary (pseudo-)Riemannian manifolds.