Friday, 28 December 2018

classical mechanics - Hamilton-Jacobi formalism and on-shell actions


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


$$ \frac{\partial L}{\partial \dot q} = p = \frac{\partial S^\text{on-shell}}{\partial q} $$


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


\begin{align} S^\text{on-shell} &= \int_{t_i}^{t_f} L dt \\ &= \frac{m}{2} \int_{t_i}^{t_f} \left( \dot q^2 - \omega^2 q^2 \right) dt\\ &= \frac{m}{2} \int_{t_i}^{t_f} \left( \frac{d}{dt} (q \dot q) - q \ddot q - \omega^2 q^2 \right) \\ &= \frac{m}{2} \left[ q(t_f) \dot q(t_f) - q(t_i) \dot q(t_i) \right] \end{align}


Now, this depends on $\dot q$, 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?




No comments:

Post a Comment

Understanding Stagnation point in pitot fluid

What is stagnation point in fluid mechanics. At the open end of the pitot tube the velocity of the fluid becomes zero.But that should result...