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Published 1984 | Published
Journal Article Open

Semidirect products and reduction in mechanics

Abstract

This paper shows how to reduce a Hamiltonian system on the cotangent bundle of a Lie group to a Hamiltonian system in the dual of the Lie algebra of a semidirect product. The procedure simplifies, unifies, and extends work of Greene, Guillemin, Holm, Holmes, Kupershmidt, Marsden, Morrison, Ratiu, Sternberg and others. The heavy top, compressible fluids, magnetohydrodynamics, elasticity, the Maxwell-Vlasov equations and multifluid plasmas are presented as examples. Starting with Lagrangian variables, our method explains in a direct way why semidirect products occur so frequently in examples. It also provides a framework for the systematic introduction of Clebsch, or canonical, variables

Additional Information

© 1984 American Mathematical Society. Received by the editors September 17, 1982. We would like to thank Darryl Holm, Boris Kupershmidt and Phil Morrison for useful discussions and correspondence. Research partially supported by NSF grants MCS 81-07086, MCS 80-23356, the Miller Institute and DOE contract DE-AT03-82ERI2097. Research partially supported by NSF grant MCS 81-01642.

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August 19, 2023
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