Covariant Hamiltonian formalism for the calculus of variations with several variables

Abstract

The main purpose in the present paper is to build a Hamiltonian theory for fields which is consistent with the principles of relativity. For this we consider detailed geometric pictures of Lepage theories in the spirit of Dedecker and try to stress out the interplay between the Lepage-Dedecker (LP) description and the (more usual) de Donder-Weyl (dDW) one. For instance the Legendre transform in the dDW approach is replaced by a Legendre correspondence in the LP theory, while ignoring singularities whenever the Lagrangian is degenerate. Moreover we show that there exist two different definitions of the observable (n-1)-forms which allows one to construct observable functionals by integration (which correspond to two different points of view: generalizing the law {p,q} = 1 or the law dF\dt = {H,F}), oddly enough we prove that these two definitions coincides only in the LP situation. Finally other contributions concerning this subject and examples are also given.