A Recursive Scheme of First Integrals of the Geodesic Flow of a Finsler Manifold

Willy Sarlet

Published 2007-02-13Version 1

We review properties of so-called special conformal Killing tensors on a Riemannian manifold $(Q,g)$ and the way they give rise to a Poisson-Nijenhuis structure on the tangent bundle $TQ$. We then address the question of generalizing this concept to a Finsler space, where the metric tensor field comes from a regular Lagrangian function $E$, homogeneous of degree two in the fibre coordinates on $TQ$. It is shown that when a symmetric type (1,1) tensor field $K$ along the tangent bundle projection $\tau: TQ\to Q$ satisfies a differential condition which is similar to the defining relation of special conformal Killing tensors, there exists a direct recursive scheme again for first integrals of the geodesic spray. Involutivity of such integrals, unfortunately, remains an open problem.