No Arabic abstract
It is well-known that a Lagrangian induces a compatible presymplectic form on the equation manifold (stationary surface, understood as a submanifold of the respective jet-space). Given an equation manifold and a compatible presymplectic form therein, we define the first-order Lagrangian system which is formulated in terms of the intrinsic geometry of the equation manifold. It has a structure of a presymplectic AKSZ sigma model for which the equation manifold, equipped with the presymplectic form and the horizontal differential, serves as the target space. For a wide class of systems (but not all) we show that if the presymplectic structure originates from a given Lagrangian, the proposed first-order Lagrangian is equivalent to the initial one and hence the Lagrangian per se can be entirely encoded in terms of the intrinsic geometry of its stationary surface. If the compatible presymplectic structure is generic, the proposed Lagrangian is only a partial one in the sense that its stationary surface contains the initial equation manifold but does not necessarily coincide with it.
We study the construction of the intrinsic action for PDEs equipped with the compatible presymplectic structures. In particular, we explicitly demonstrate that the intrinsic action for the standard Einstein-Hilbert gravity is the familiar first-order Palatini action. We then study the example of massive spin-2 field, where the natural presymplectic structure is not complete in the sense that the associated intrinsic action does not reproduce all the equations of motion. We explicitly relate this to the differential consequences of zeroth order in the genuine Lagrangian formulation of Fierz and Pauli. Moreover, we construct a minimal multisymplectic extension of the intrinsic action that produces all the equations of motion and argue that systems of this type can be naturally regarded as multidimensional analogs of mechanical systems with constraints.
Any local gauge theory can be represented as an AKSZ sigma model (upon parameterization if necessary). However, for non-topological models in dimension higher than 1 the target space is necessarily infinite-dimensional. The interesting alternative known for some time is to allow for degenerate presymplectic structure in the target space. This leads to a very concise AKSZ-like representation for frame-like Lagrangians of gauge systems. In this work we concentrate on Einstein gravity and show that not only the Lagrangian but also the full-scale Batalin--Vilkovisky formulation is naturally encoded in the presymplectic AKSZ formulation, giving an elegant supergeometrical construction of BV for Cartan-Weyl action. The same applies to the main structures of the respective Hamiltonian BFV formulation.
We construct a Lagrangian for general nonlinear electrodynamics that features electric and magnetic potentials on equal footing. In the language of this Lagrangian, discrete and continuous electric-magnetic duality symmetries can be straightforwardly imposed, leading to a simple formulation for theories with the $SO(2)$ duality invariance. When specialized to the conformally invariant case, our construction provides a manifestly duality-symmetric formulation of the recently discovered ModMax theory. We briefly comment on a natural generalization of this approach to $p$-forms in $2p+2$ dimensions.
Lagrangian descriptions of irreducible and reducible integer higher-spin representations of the Poincare group subject to a Young tableaux $Y[hat{s}_1,hat{s}_2]$ with two columns are constructed within a metric-like formulation in a $d$-dimensional flat space-time on the basis of a BRST approach extending the results of [arXiv:1412.0200[hep-th]]. A Lorentz-invariant resolution of the BRST complex within both the constrained and unconstrained BRST formulations produces a gauge-invariant Lagrangian entirely in terms of the initial tensor field $Phi_{[mu]_{hat{s}_1}, [mu]_{hat{s}_2}}$ subject to $Y[hat{s}_1,hat{s}_2]$ with an additional tower of gauge parameters realizing the $(hat{s}_1-1)$-th stage of reducibility with a specific dependence on the value $(hat{s}_1-hat{s}_2)=0,1,...,hat{s}_1$. Minimal BRST--BV action is suggested, being proper solution to the master equation in the minimal sector and providing objects appropriate to construct interacting Lagrangian formulations with mixed-antisymmetric fields in a general framework.
We investigate integrability of Euler-Lagrange equations associated with 2D second-order Lagrangians of the form begin{equation*} int f(u_{xx},u_{xy},u_{yy}) dxdy. end{equation*} By deriving integrability conditions for the Lagrangian density $f$, examples of integrable Lagrangians expressible via elementary functions, Jacobi theta functions and dilogarithms are constructed. A link of second-order integrable Lagrangians to WDVV equations is established. Generalisations to 3D second-order integrable Lagrangians are also discussed.