Stress-energy tensor improvement ($T\prime {}^{\mu \nu }=T^{\mu \nu }+{\partial }_{\rho }{B}^{\rho \mu \nu }$)

Adding ${\partial }_{\rho }{B}^{\rho \mu \nu }$ with $B^{\rho \mu \nu }=-B^{\mu \rho \nu }$ to a stress-energy tensor preserves its divergence identically, since commuting partial derivatives annihilates the antisymmetric pair. The total four-momentum changes only by a spatial boundary term. Improvements can make local densities symmetric or gauge-invariant; equality of integrated charges requires the chosen boundary conditions. Equation-of-motion terms can also relate representatives on shell.

For $d>1$, the displayed stress-energy tensor is symmetric and conserved on the free massless scalar field equation $\square \varphi =0$. Its improvement is identically divergence-free. Since $\square {\varphi }^2=2(\partial \varphi {)}^2$ on shell, its trace vanishes. Contracting it with a Conformal Killing vector field therefore produces a conserved conformal current. In $d=2$ the improvement coefficient is zero: the canonical tensor already has zero trace.

A stress-energy superpotential is an antisymmetric tensor $B^{\rho \mu \nu }=-B^{\mu \rho \nu }$ whose divergence supplies a stress-energy tensor improvement. In the Maxwell field, the potential-dependent expression $B^{\rho \mu }{}_{\nu }=F^{\mu \rho }{A}_{\nu }$ produces the difference between canonical and gauge-invariant stress-energy tensors on shell. Antisymmetry ensures identically conserved improvement terms.