A vector field is called a conformal Killing vector for the metric  if, where denotes Lie differentiation with respect to and is a function (proportional to the divergence of ).   If  and denotes covariant differentiation with respect to the given metric, then this equation can be written as The Killing vectors of are the solutions to this equation with  The set of all conformal Killing vectors forms a Lie algebra of vector fields.

The program ConformalKillingVectors generates the defining system of 1st order PDE for a conformal vector field and uses pdsolve to find the solutions to these PDE.

The command ConformalKillingVectors returns a sequence of two lists. The first list contains the non-trivial conformal Killing vectors and the second the Killing vectors.  If there are no non-trivial conformal Killing vector fields then the first list is empty.

The keyword argument coefficientvariables   allows the user to specify the coefficients functions in the conformal Killing vector as functions of the variables  .

The exact form of the conformal Killing vector can be specified with the keyword argument  ansatz . For example, if  the coordinates on the underlying manifold are and  are defined vectors, then one may solve for conformal Killing vectors of the form . In this situation the unknown functions must be explicitly specified with the keyword argument unknowns, for example, unknowns

When using the keyword argument ansatz, additional algebraic or differential conditions may be imposed upon the unknowns using the keyword argument auxiliaryequations Here  is a list of the auxiliary equations to be added to the conformal Killing equations.

If the metric depends upon a number of unspecified parameters (either constants or functions), then the keyword argument parameterswhere is the list of parameters, will invoke case-splitting with respect to these parameters. Special values of the parameters, where either the number or the explicit form of the conformal Killing vectors changes, are calculated.

With keyword argument output =  the defining partial differential equations for the conformal Killing vectors are returned. The option output = returns the general conformal Killing vector in terms of a number of arbitray constants  , ...  . The option output = returns a list of vectors which form a basis for the solution space. The default value of this keyword argument is output =

This command is part of the DifferentialGeometry:-Tensor package, and so can be used in the form ConformalKillingVectors(...) only after executing the commands with(DifferentialGeometry), with(Tensor) in that order.  It can always be used in the long form DifferentialGeometry:-Tensor:-ConformalKillingVectors(...).