Nonholonomic brackets: Eden revisited (Q6138220)

Nonholonomic brackets provide an analogue to Poisson brackets for nonholonomic systems. The authors note that several alternatives have been proposed over the years - two of which they previously described, but it has been difficult to determine if these alternatives are actually all different. In reviewing the literature, the authors found two papers by \textit{R.J. Eden} [Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A 205, 564--583 (1951; Zbl 0042.21701); Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. A 205, 583--595 (1951; Zbl 0042.21702)]. In the first paper, Eden introduced an operator \(\gamma\) that mapped free states to constrained states. That operator is a tensor of type (1,1) that has the properties of a projector. With this, Eden got equations of motion, the ability to calculate brackets of all observables, found a simple Hamilton-Jacobi equation, and managed to construct a quantization of the nonholonomic system. In this paper the authors identify the operator \(\gamma\) as a projection defined by the orthogonal decomposition of the cotangent bundle that the Riemannian metric provides via kinetic energy. They then define a new bracket they call the Eden bracket, and prove that the previous definitions of nonholonomic bracket coincide with this one. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1528.53002].