Hamiltonian Dynamics for an alternative action describing Maxwell's equations

Abstract

We develop a complete Dirac's canonical analysis for an alternative action that yields Maxwell's four-dimensional equations of motion. We study in detail the full symmetries of the action by following all steps of Dirac's method in order to obtain a detailed description of symmetries. Our results indicate that such an action does not have the same symmetries than Maxwell theory, namely, the model is not a gauge theory and the number of physical degrees of freedom are different.