Stationary spinning strings and symmetries of classical spacetimes

We explore the symmetries of classical stationary spacetimes in terms of the dynamics of a spinning string described by a worldsheet supersymmetric action. We show that for stationary configurations of the string, the action reduces to that for a pseudo-classical spinning point particle in an effective space, which is a conformally scaled quotient space of the original spacetime. As an example, we consider the stationary spinning string in the Kerr-Newman spacetime, whose motion is equivalent to that of the spinning point particle in the three-dimensional effective space. We present the Killing tensor as well as the spin-valued Killing vector of this space. However, the nongeneric supersymmetry corresponding to the Killing-Yano tensor of the Kerr-Newman spacetime is lost in the effective space. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.