First-class constraint: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:05, 17 December 2009

Revision as of 08:27, 5 March 2010

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The catch is, the Hamiltonian flows on the constrained subspace depend on the gradient of the Hamiltonian there, not its value. But there's an easy way out of this.

Look at the [[orbit (group theory)|orbits]] of the constrained subspace under the action of the [[symplectic flow]]s generated by the ''f'''s. This gives a local [[foliation]] of the subspace because it satisfies [[integrability condition]]s ([[Frobenius theorem (differential topology)|Frobenius theorem]]). It turns out if we start with two different points on a same orbit on the constrained subspace and evolve both of them under two different Hamiltonians, respectively. which agree on the constrained subspace, then the time evolution of both points under their respective Hamiltonian flows will always lie in the same orbit at equal times. It also turns out if we have two smooth functions ''A''₁ and ''B''₁ which are constant over orbits at least on the constrained subspace (i.e. physical observables) (i.e. {A₁,f}={B₁,f}=0 over the constrained subspace)and another two A₂ and B₂ which are also constant over orbits such that A₁ and B₁ agrees with A₂ and B₂ respectively over the restraintedrestrained subspace, then their Poisson brackets {A₁, B₁} and {A₂, B₂} are also constant over orbits and agree over the constraintedconstrained subspace.

In general, we{{Who}} can't rule out "[[ergodic]]" flows (which basically means that an orbit is dense in some open set), or "subergodic" flows (which an orbit dense in some submanifold of dimension greater than the orbit's dimension). We can't have [[self-intersecting]] orbits.

For most "practical" applications of first -class constraints, we do not see such complications: the [[quotient space]] of the restricted subspace by the f-flows (in other words, the orbit space) is well behaved enough to act as a [[differentiable manifold]], which can be turned into a [[symplectic manifold]] by projecting the [[symplectic form]] of M onto it (this can be shown to be [[well defined]]). In light of the observation about physical observables mentioned earlier, we can work with this more "physical" smaller symplectic manifold, but with 2n fewer dimensions.

In general, the quotient space is a bit "nasty" to work with when doing concrete calculations (not to mention nonlocal when working with [[diffeomorphism constraint]]s), so what is usually done instead is something similar. Note that the restricted submanifold is a [[bundle]] (but not a [[fiber bundle]] in general) over the quotient manifold. So, instead of working with the quotient manifold, we can work with a [[section]] of the bundle instead. This is called [[gauge fixing]].

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The ''major'' problem is this bundle might not have a [[global section]] in general. This is where the "problem" of [[global anomaly|global anomalies]] comes in, for example. See [[Gribov ambiguity]]. This is a flaw in quantizing [[gauge theory|gauge theories]] which many physicists had overlooked.

What have been described are irreducible first -class constraints. Another complication is that Δf might not be [[right invertible]] on subspaces of the restricted submanifold of [[codimension]] 1 or greater (which violates the stronger assumption stated earlier in this article). This happens, for example in the [[cotetrad]] formulation of [[general relativity]], at the subspace of configurations where the [[cotetrad field]] and the [[connection form]] happen to be zero over some open subset of space. Here, the constraints are the diffeomorphism constraints.

One way to get around this is this: For reducible constraints, we relax the condition on the right invertibility of Δ''f'' into this one: Any smooth function which vanishes at the zeros of ''f'' is the fiberwise contraction of ''f'' with (a non-unique) smooth section of a <math>\bar{V}</math>-vector bundle where <math>\bar{V}</math> is the [[dual vector space]] to the constraint vector space ''V''. This is called the ''regularity condition''.