Tautological one-form
In mathematics, the tautological one-form is a special 1-form defined on the cotangent bundle of a manifold In physics, it is used to create a correspondence between the velocity of a point in a mechanical system and its momentum, thus providing a bridge between Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics (on the manifold ).
The exterior derivative of this form defines a symplectic form giving the structure of a symplectic manifold. The tautological one-form plays an important role in relating the formalism of Hamiltonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics. The tautological one-form is sometimes also called the Liouville one-form, the Poincaré one-form, the canonical one-form, or the symplectic potential. A similar object is the canonical vector field on the tangent bundle.
To define the tautological one-form, select a coordinate chart on and a canonical coordinate system on Pick an arbitrary point By definition of cotangent bundle, where and The tautological one-form is given by with and being the coordinate representation of
Any coordinates on that preserve this definition, up to a total differential (exact form), may be called canonical coordinates; transformations between different canonical coordinate systems are known as canonical transformations.
The canonical symplectic form, also known as the Poincaré two-form, is given by
The extension of this concept to general fibre bundles is known as the solder form. By convention, one uses the phrase "canonical form" whenever the form has a unique, canonical definition, and one uses the term "solder form", whenever an arbitrary choice has to be made. In algebraic geometry and complex geometry the term "canonical" is discouraged, due to confusion with the canonical class, and the term "tautological" is preferred, as in tautological bundle.
Coordinate-free definition
[edit]The tautological 1-form can also be defined rather abstractly as a form on phase space. Let be a manifold and be the cotangent bundle or phase space. Let be the canonical fiber bundle projection, and let be the induced tangent map. Let be a point on Since is the cotangent bundle, we can understand to be a map of the tangent space at :
That is, we have that is in the fiber of The tautological one-form at point is then defined to be
It is a linear map and so
Symplectic potential
[edit]The symplectic potential is generally defined a bit more freely, and also only defined locally: it is any one-form such that ; in effect, symplectic potentials differ from the canonical 1-form by a closed form.
Properties
[edit]The tautological one-form is the unique one-form that "cancels" pullback. That is, let be a 1-form on is a section For an arbitrary 1-form on the pullback of by is, by definition, Here, is the pushforward of Like is a 1-form on The tautological one-form is the only form with the property that for every 1-form on
Proof. |
For a chart on (where let be the coordinates on where the fiber coordinates are associated with the linear basis By assumption, for every or It follows that which implies that Step 1. We have Step 1'. For completeness, we now give a coordinate-free proof that for any 1-form Observe that, intuitively speaking, for every and the linear map in the definition of projects the tangent space onto its subspace As a consequence, for every and where is the instance of at the point that is, Applying the coordinate-free definition of to obtain Step 2. It is enough to show that if for every one-form Let where Substituting into the identity obtain or equivalently, for any choice of functions Let where In this case, For every and This shows that on and the identity must hold for an arbitrary choice of functions If (with indicating superscript) then and the identity becomes for every and Since we see that as long as for all On the other hand, the function is continuous, and hence on |
So, by the commutation between the pull-back and the exterior derivative,
Action
[edit]If is a Hamiltonian on the cotangent bundle and is its Hamiltonian vector field, then the corresponding action is given by
In more prosaic terms, the Hamiltonian flow represents the classical trajectory of a mechanical system obeying the Hamilton-Jacobi equations of motion. The Hamiltonian flow is the integral of the Hamiltonian vector field, and so one writes, using traditional notation for action-angle variables: with the integral understood to be taken over the manifold defined by holding the energy constant:
On Riemannian and Pseudo-Riemannian Manifolds
[edit]If the manifold has a Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metric then corresponding definitions can be made in terms of generalized coordinates. Specifically, if we take the metric to be a map then define and
In generalized coordinates on one has and
The metric allows one to define a unit-radius sphere in The canonical one-form restricted to this sphere forms a contact structure; the contact structure may be used to generate the geodesic flow for this metric.
References
[edit]- Ralph Abraham and Jerrold E. Marsden, Foundations of Mechanics, (1978) Benjamin-Cummings, London ISBN 0-8053-0102-X See section 3.2.