Collineations of a symmetric 2-covariant tensor: Ricci collineations

The infinitesimal transformations that leave invariant a two-covariant symmetric tensor are studied. The interest of these symmetry transformations lays in the fact that this class of tensors includes the energy-momentum and Ricci tensors. We find that in most cases the class of infinitesimal generators of these transformations is a finite dimensional Lie algebra, but in some cases exhibiting a higher degree of degeneracy, this class is infinite dimensional and may fail to be a Lie algebra. As an application, we study the Ricci collineations of a type B warped spacetime. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.