Saturday, 4 October 2014

hamiltonian formalism - Why do such different Lagrangians give the same ELEs?


The Lagrangians L±:=12(˙q21±˙q22)12m2(q21±q22) each have Euler-Lagrange equations ¨qi=m2qi,i{1,2}. The obvious reason is that these equations are uncoupled, so any linear combination of "one-equation" Lagrangians, including these ± choices, will give the same pair.


The Lagrangian L0:=˙q1˙q2m2q1q2 has the same ELEs as well, so it doesn't couple the qi even though it looks like it might. What's the physical interpretation of L0 obtaining the same ELEs as L+? It doesn't seem to be of the form aL++b+˙f.


Thinking in terms of Hamiltonians doesn't make it any clearer. With L0 as our choice of Lagrangian, the Hamiltonian is H0:=p1p2+m2q1q2, which bears no obvious equivalence to H±:=12(p21±p22)+12m2(q21±q22). (The momenta have different definitions in terms of the ˙qi in the two cases, but of course we still get the same equations of motion in all cases.)



So is there a more general principle that explains why L± is equivalent to L0, or H± to H0?



Answer



Having thought about this, I think I've found the key point. A Lagrangian of the form 12A˙q212Bq2 with 1-dimensional q and numbers A,B with A0 has equations of motion that depend only on A1B, as scaling the Lagrangian is physically irrelevant. In particular, scaling the Lagrangian can be thought of as a scaling of the coefficients. For multi-dimensional q, we can generalise this result. In a Lagrangian LAB:=12˙qTA˙q12qTBq we can assume without loss of generality that A,B are symmetric, in which case p=A˙q so the equation of motion is A¨q=Bq. If A is invertible this simplifies to ¨q=A1Bq, which is invariant under a "scaling" of the matrix coefficients of the form A,BKA,KB, with K an arbitrary invertible square matrix conformable with A,B. We can find the same result in the Hamiltonian formalism, viz HAB:=12pTA1p+12qTBq.


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