Conservation Laws in Gravitation and Cosmology

The existence of conservation laws is one of the most important requirement of physical theories. Some of them, like energy conservation, knows no experimental exception. However, the generalization of these conservation laws to curved space presents many challenges. The implementation of conservation laws in the General Relativity theory is revised, and the possibility of the generalization of the usual expression is discussed. The Rastall's theory of gravity, which considers a modification of the usual conservation of the energy-momentum tensor, is discussed in more detail. Some applications of the Rastall's theory to cosmology are presented, showing that it can lead to competetive results with respect to the Standard Cosmological Model.