On some conservation laws of conservative and non-conservative dynamic systems (Q1822536)

This paper addresses the problem of establishing conservation laws of classical conservative and non-conservative dynamical systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom. At first, general forms of the so- called basic identity of Noether are obtained for these systems after which the derivation, from these identities, of generators of the infinitesimal transformations of the generalized coordinates and time is discussed. This is illustrated by way of the example of an energy-type conservation law for a linearly damped oscillating system with two degrees of freedom, and it appears that the law that is obtained is new, not having appeared in the literature. In the second part the authors then consider a special class of conservation laws of certain conservative dynamical systems, which also seem to be quite new. Their main characteristic is that they contain a Hamiltonian action integral, of which the value is not known; in fact, they represent an integral relation between the parameters figuring in the dynamical system rather than an ordinary conservation law (which of course does not contain any terms involving integrals). For this reason they are indeed called action integral conservation laws. A number of illustrative examples are provided, namely, the dynamical system with equation ẍ\(+ax^ kt^{1-k}=0\), and its special case ẍ\(=x\sqrt{x/t}\) (the Thomas-Fermi equation); the usual linearly damped harmonic oscillator ẍ\(+2k\dot x+\omega^ 2x=0\) with Lagrangian \(L=(\dot x^ 2- \omega^ 2x^ 2)e^{2kt}\); and then a system with Lagrangian \(L=\dot x^ 2+ax^ 2/t^ 2\); while the last example deals with the nonlinear oscillator under linear damping for which the equation is ẍ\(+2k\dot x+ax+bx^ n=0.\) On the whole, this is an interesting paper, unfortunately slightly marred by some printing errors, chiefly due to excessive linearization of the formulas, this resulting in misplacement of brackets and some ambiguities in fractions. In view of the availability of English translations it also was perhaps unnecessary to refer (in some detail) to the Russian edition of L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz's quantum mechanics (1963).