Hamiltonian formalism in supermechanics (Q1597509)

A typical university course in classical mechanics (treated in the spirit of the applied variational calculus) could contain, say, the following chapters: ... 4. Action functional and variational principle. 5. Euler--Lagrange equations. ... 7. Poincaré--Cartan forms. 8. Hamilton equations. ... 14 . Schouten brackets. Precisely the same sections appear in the present review, with the only re-qualification that the author speaks about the classical mechanics in its supersymmetric generalization. Originally intended to be a theory which involves spin and distinguishes between the bosons and fermions (and which, quite paradoxically, emerged first in its more complicated quantum version), the subject became a full-fledged part of mathematics after Berezin imagined the importance of the underlying graded manifold structures and defined his integral in a way which need not be cited equally well as one does not cite Euler, Lagrange, Hamilton, Cartan and Poincaré. In this context, the authors develop the Hamilton--Cartan formalism on the space of curves of a graded manifold. In this manner the even and odd variables prove tractable, on precisely the same footing, in a way presented in pleasing detail and emphasizing the existence of the graded and symplectic structures on the solution manifolds. The text is surprisingly compact (the authors often refer to their older papers for more details) and pleasing the reader by a number of useful insights associating, e.g., an equivalent graded Lagrangian density to each Berezinian Lagrangian density (with the link being given by the total derivative with respect to the odd coordinate), offering the pattern of transition to the Hamiltonian formalism in canonical coordinates, etc.