The relation between the canonical Hamilton-Jacobi equation and the covariant Hamilton-Jacobi equation for Maxwell's electrodynamics

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand the relation between the canonical Hamilton-Jacobi equation for Maxwell's electrodynamics, which is an equation with variational derivatives for a functional of field configurations, and the covariant (De Donder-Weyl) Hamilton-Jacobi equation, which is a partial derivative equation on a finite dimensional space of vector potentials and spacetime coordinates. We show that the procedure of spacetime splitting applied to the latter allows us to reproduce both the canonical Hamilton-Jacobi equation and the Gauss law constraint in the Hamilton-Jacobi form without a recourse to the canonical Hamiltonian analysis. Our consideration may help to analyze the quasi-classical limit of the connection between the standard quantization in field theory based on the canonical Hamiltonian formalism with a preferred time dimension and the precanonical quantization that uses the De Donder-Weyl Hamiltonian formulation where space and time dimensions treated equally.