The principles of gauge symmetry and quantization are fundamental to modern understanding of the laws of electromagnetism, weak and strong subatomic forces and the theory of general relativity. Ideal for graduate students and researchers in theoretical and mathematical physics, this unique book provides a systematic introduction to Hamiltonian mechanics of systems with gauge symmetry. The book reveals how gauge symmetry may lead to a non-trivial geometry of the physical phase space and studies its effect on quantum dynamics by path integral methods. It also covers aspects of Hamiltonian path integral formalism in detail, along with a number of related topics such as the theory of canonical transformations on phase space supermanifolds, non-commutativity of canonical quantization and elimination of non-physical variables. The discussion is accompanied by numerous detailed examples of dynamical models with gauge symmetries, clearly illustrating the key concepts.

This book is a systematic study of the classical and quantum theories of gauge systems. It starts with Dirac's analysis showing that gauge theories are constrained Hamiltonian systems. The classical foundations of BRST theory are then laid out with a review of the necessary concepts from homological algebra. Reducible gauge systems are discussed, and the relationship between BRST cohomology and gauge invariance is carefully explained. The authors then proceed to the canonical quantization of gauge systems, first without ghosts (reduced phase space quantization, Dirac method) and second in the BRST context (quantum BRST cohomology). The path integral is discussed next. The analysis covers indefinite metric systems, operator insertions, and Ward identities. The antifield formalism is also studied and its equivalence with canonical methods is derived. The examples of electromagnetism and abelian 2-form gauge fields are treated in detail. The book gives a general and unified treatment of the subject in a self-contained manner. Exercises are provided at the end of each chapter, and pedagogical examples are covered in the text.

This book is an introduction to the field of constrained Hamiltonian systems and their quantization, a topic which is of central interest to theoretical physicists who wish to obtain a deeper understanding of the quantization of gauge theories, such as describing the fundamental interactions in nature. Beginning with the early work of Dirac, the book covers the main developments in the field up to more recent topics, such as the field?antifield formalism of Batalin and Vilkovisky, including a short discussion of how gauge anomalies may be incorporated into this formalism. All topics are well illustrated with examples emphasizing points of central interest. The book should enable graduate students to follow the literature on this subject without much problems, and to perform research in this field.

This is both a textbook and a monograph. It is partially based on a two-semester course, held by the author for third-year students in physics and mathematics at the University of Salerno, on analytical mechanics, differential geometry, symplectic manifolds and integrable systems.As a textbook, it provides a systematic and self-consistent formulation of Hamiltonian dynamics both in a rigorous coordinate language and in the modern language of differential geometry. It also presents powerful mathematical methods of theoretical physics, especially in gauge theories and general relativity.As a monograph, the book deals with the advanced research topic of completely integrable dynamics, with both finitely and infinitely many degrees of freedom, including geometrical structures of solitonic wave equations.

This book presents in a unified way modern geometric methods in analytical mechanics based on the application of fibre bundles, jet manifold formalism and the related concept of connection. Non-relativistic mechanics is seen as a particular field theory over a one-dimensional base. In fact, the concept of connection is the major link throughout the book. In the gauge scheme of mechanics, connections appear as reference frames, dynamic equations, and in Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms. Non-inertial forces, energy conservation laws and other phenomena related to reference frames are analyzed; that leads us to observable physics. The gauge formulation of classical mechanics is extended to quantum mechanics under different reference frames. Special topics on geometric BRST mechanics, relativistic mechanics and others, together with many examples, are also dealt with.

In the framework of the geometric formulation of field theory, classical fields are represented by sections of fibred manifolds, and their dynamics is phrased in jet manifold terms. The Hamiltonian formalism in fibred manifolds is the multisymplectic generalization of the Hamiltonian formalism in mechanics when canonical momenta correspond to derivatives of fields with respect to all world coordinates, not only to time. This book is devoted to the application of this formalism to fundamental field models including gauge theory, gravitation theory, and spontaneous symmetry breaking. All these models are constraint ones. Their Euler-Lagrange equations are underdetermined and need additional conditions. In the Hamiltonian formalism, these conditions appear automatically as a part of the Hamilton equations, corresponding to different Hamiltonian forms associated with a degenerate Lagrangian density. The general procedure for describing constraint systems with quadratic and affine Lagrangian densities is presented.

The geometric formulation of autonomous Hamiltonian mechanics in the terms of symplectic and Poisson manifolds is generally accepted. This book provides the geometric formulation of non-autonomous mechanics in a general setting of time-dependent coordinate and reference frame transformations.

The book introduces classical mechanics. It does so in an informal style with numerous fresh, modern and inter-disciplinary applications assuming no prior knowledge of the necessary mathematics. The book provides a comprehensive and self-contained treatment of the subject matter up to the forefront of research in multiple areas.

This book offers an explicitly covariant canonical formalism that is devised in the usual mathematical language of standard textbooks on classical dynamics. It elaborates on important questions: How do we convert the entire canonical formalism of Lagrange and Hamilton that are built upon Newton's concept of an absolute time into a relativistically correct form that is appropriate to our present knowledge? How do we treat the space-time variables in a Hamiltonian Field Theory on equal footing as in the Lagrangian description of field theory without introducing a new mathematical language? How can a closed covariant canonical gauge theory be obtained from it? To answer the last question, the theory of homogenous and inhomogeneous gauge transformations is worked out in this book on the basis of the canonical transformation theory for fields elaborated before. In analogy to the treatment of time in relativistic point mechanics, the canonical formalism in field theory is further extended to a space-time that is no longer fixed but is also treated as a canonical variable. Applied to a generalized theory of gauge transformations, this opens the door to a new approach to general relativity.