An Action Principle for Action-dependent Lagrangians: toward an Action Principle to non-conservative systems

Abstract

In this work, we propose an Action Principle for Action-dependent Lagrangian functions by generalizing the Herglotz variational problem to the case with several independent variables. We obtain a necessary condition for the extremum equivalent to the Euler-Lagrange equation and, through some examples, we show that this generalized Action Principle enables us to construct simple and physically meaningful Action-dependent Lagrangian functions for a wide range of non-conservative classical and quantum systems. Furthermore, when the dependence on the Action is removed, the traditional Action Principle for conservative systems is recovered.