A new geometric approach to Lie systems and physical applications (Q1597432)

It is known that time evolution of many physical systems is described by nonautonomous systems of differential equations \[ {dx^{i}\over dt}=X^{i}(t,x),\qquad i=1,\dots,n. \] For instance, this happens for Hamilton equations or Lagrange equations when transformed to the first-order case by doubling the number of degrees of freedom. The theorem of existence and uniqueness of a solution to such systems establishes that the initial conditions \(x(0)\) determine the future evolution. The aim of the present paper is to review the theory developed by Lie from geometric viewpoint and to present different applications both in mathematics and physics. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the main theorem due to Lie and some simple examples are given in section 3. In Section 4, after the introduction of some notation concerning the ingredients of Lie group theory, a particular case in which the systems are defined in a Lie group \(G\) is analyzed, and it is shown how to relate them to particular types of equations in a group. The authors also show that Lie systems in homogeneous spaces are naturally associated with these systems in Lie groups. The theory is illustrated by a pair of examples which point out the universal character of the equation in the group. Section 5 is devoted to present a generalization of the method proposed by Wei and Norman for linear systems and an example of the affine group in one dimension is used to illustrate the theory. A relation of the problem at hand with the theory of connections is studied in section 6: it is shown that Lie systems define the horizontal curves with respect to a connection. The reduction method developed in section 7 corresponds to considering the action of the group of automorphisms of the principal bundle on the set of connections, transforming in this way the given problem into a simpler one. Some examples and references to different applications of this reduction method are also given. Applications of the general theory to different problems in both classical and quantum mechanics are indicated in section 8 with special emphasis on time evolution of time-dependent Hamiltonian systems. An example of the time-dependent linear potential model has been explicitly developed in section 9 in both the classical and quantum cases.