Secondary calculus and the covariant phase space

Geometric quantization (53D50) Applications of differential geometry to physics (53Z05) Differential topology (57R99) Lagrangian formalism and Hamiltonian formalism in mechanics of particles and systems (70S05)

Abstract: The covariant phase space of a Lagrangian field theory is the solution space of the associated Euler-Lagrange equations. It is, in principle, a nice environment for covariant quantization of a Lagrangian field theory. Indeed, it is manifestly covariant and possesses a canonical (functional) "presymplectic structure" w (as first noticed by Zuckerman in 1986) whose degeneracy (functional) distribution is naturally interpreted as the Lie algebra of gauge transformations. We propose a fully rigorous approach to the covariant phase space in the framework of secondary calculus. In particular we describe the degeneracy distribution of w. As a byproduct we rederive the existence of a Lie bracket among gauge invariant functions on the covariant phase space.

Review text

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 \((P, \omega )\).

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