arXiv2022
In General Relativity, there have been many proposals for defining the gravitational energy density, notably those proposed by Einstein, Tolman, Landau and Lifshitz, Papapetrou, Møller, and Weinberg. In this review, we firstly explored the energy--momentum complex in an $n^{th}$ order gravitational Lagrangian $L=L\left(g_{μν}, g_{μν,i_{1}}, g_{μν,i_{1}i_{2}},g_{μν,i_{1}i_{2}i_{3}},\cdots, g_{μν,i_{1}i_{2}i_{3}\cdots i_{n}}\right)$ and then in a gravitational Lagrangian as \mbox{$L_{g}=(\overline{R}+a_{0}R^{2}+\sum_{k=1}^{p} a_{k}R\Box^{k}R)\sqrt{-g}$}. Its gravitational part was obtained by invariance of gravitational action under infinitesimal rigid translations using Noether's theorem. We also showed that this tensor, in general, is not a covariant object but only an affine object, that is, a pseudo-tensor. Therefore, the pseudo-tensor $τ^η_α$ becomes the one introduced by Einstein if we limit ourselves to General Relativity and its extended corrections have been explicitly indicated. The same method was used to derive the energy--momentum complex in $ f\left (R \right) $ gravity both in Palatini and metric approaches. Moreover, in the weak field approximation the pseudo-tensor $τ^η_α$ to lowest order in the metric perturbation $h$ was calculated. As a practical application, the power per unit solid angle $Ω$ emitted by a localized source carried by a gravitational wave in a direction $\hat{x}$ for a fixed wave number $\mathbf{k}$ under a suitable gauge was obtained, through the average value of the pseudo-tensor over a suitable spacetime domain and the local conservation of the pseudo-tensor. As a cosmological application, in a flat Friedmann--Lemaître--Robertson--Walker spacetime, the gravitational and matter energy density in $f(R)$ gravity both in Palatini and metric formalism was proposed.