Discrete Lagrangian field theories on Lie groupoids (Q864262)

The authors extend the formalism introduced by \textit{A. Weinstein} [Am. Math. Soc. Fields Inst. Commun. 7, 207--231 (1996; Zbl 0844.22007)] to discrete classical field theories. A crucial element of the geometric approach to discrete field theories presented in this paper is the concept of discrete jet bundle. The notion of ``discrete jet bundle of \(\pi\)'' (where \(\pi :\mathbb{R}^{2}\times Q\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{2}\) is a trivial bundle) is introduced using two essentially different ingredients: a groupoid \(G\) over the standard fibre \(Q\) of \(\pi\) and a mesh in \(X=\mathbb{R}^{2}\), consisting of a discrete subset \(V\) of \(X\), whose elements are called vertices, and a set \(E\) of edges, which are line segments between pairs of vertices. The idea of a ``discrete field'' is expressed in terms of a mapping that associates to each edge an element of the groupoid \(G\), and to each vertex in \(V\) a unit of \(G\), such that such that two edges which have a vertex in common are mapped onto composable elements of \(G\). It is shown that each such mapping gives rise to a groupoid morphism from the pair groupoid \(V \times V\) to \(G\). In the particular case where \(G\) is the pair groupoid \(Q \times Q\), a discrete field is an assignment of an element of \(Q\) to each point of a grid in \(X\), which is a natural way to think of discrete fields [\textit{J. E. Marsden, G. W. Patrick} and \textit{S. Shkoller}, Commun. Math. Phys. 199, No.~2, 351--395 (1998; Zbl 0951.70002)]. The arbitrary Lie groupoid \(G\), introduced as a new ingredient in the definition of a discrete field, allows the authors to recover not only previously known results on discrete multisymplectic field theories, but also to derive a number of new results, most notably a discrete version of the Lie-Poisson equations for field theories. In the final section, the authors establish the connection with discrete differential geometry and gauge theories on a lattice (interpreting the gauge group as a Lie groupoid over the unity, discrete fields, in previous the sense, correspond to flat gauge fields).