My question is essentially how to extract the canonical momentum out of an on-shell action.
The Hamilton-Jacobi formalism tells us that Hamilton's principal function is the on-shell action, which depends only on the coordinates q. Therefore, if S refers to the off-shell action with Lagrangian L, a result for the canonical momentum is
∂L∂˙q=p=∂Son-shell∂q
In theory, when evaluating the on-shell action, one plugs in the EOM into S and all that's left are boundary terms. If we illustrate this with the harmonic oscillator in 1D, one gets
Son-shell=∫tftiLdt=m2∫tfti(˙q2−ω2q2)dt=m2∫tfti(ddt(q˙q)−q¨q−ω2q2)=m2[q(tf)˙q(tf)−q(ti)˙q(ti)]
Now, this depends on ˙q, whereas it should depend only on generalized coordinates. Also, the on-shell action depends on the boundary values of our coordinate q, so we can't differentiate w.r.t. q(t) to get a conjugate momentum p(t) for all times, like it is usually done in the Lagrangian formalism.
What am I not seeing?
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