Secondary calculus and the covariant phase space (Q2270495)

The covariant phase space (CPS) is the solution space of a system of Euler-Lagrange partial differential equations and is, in principle, a good environment to perform a covariant (canonical) quantization of a Lagrangian theory. Despite its conceptual relevance, the CPS is, in general, a complicated functional space, which is difficult to handle with analytic methods. So, the aim of this paper is to describe rigorously the CPS \(P\), its canonical 2-form \(\omega \) and some of their properties within the secondary calculus. As a byproduct it will become transparent the analogy between the CPS and the phase space of constrained mechanical systems. A step forward in this study would be to rigorously perform a symplectic reduction of \((P, \omega )\).